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Gerard ’t Hooft: The Nobel Laureate Who (Also) Says Quantum Theory Is "Totally Wrong"

August 12, 2025 • 1:33:35 • undefined

Channel: Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

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[0:00] The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.

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[1:06] Picture reality as a cosmic pinball machine.

[1:13] Every ball follows a deterministic path, no exceptions. To Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard Tuft, the fact that we can't track all these balls is why we invented quantum mechanics, effectively to handle our ignorance. This is quite a startling proposal, especially from the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on the electroweak interaction.

[1:36] To the professor, there are no real numbers, there's no superposition, not even wave functions fundamentally.

[1:44] Instead, there are these discrete cellular automata updating in quantized steps. Today, we discuss why he thinks standard physics has it backward, particles don't exist in multiple states, cats aren't simultaneously dead and alive, the universe never plays dice. I'm Kurt Jaimungal, and in this conversation, we tackle super determinism, why seemingly absurd theories get more support than ostensibly realistic ones,

[2:09] And how recognizing space-time quantum clones solves the problems of black holes. Professor, when we were speaking off air, you mentioned to me that the crazier the proposal, the easier it is to get accepted. What did you mean by that?

[2:28] Well, it happens very often, rather surprisingly, if you come with a very simple theory or idea, then people have all sorts of complaints and objections. When you come to something which clearly cannot be corrected entirely and sounds like a really long distance approach, then that gets much more support in general. For example, I first encountered that when I

[2:57] was in heavy discussions with my advisor Veltman about renormalization and we agreed on one very important problem to be handled which was can it all be done consistently? The equations that you have not contradicting each other and I searched very hard and I had the idea of adding a fifth dimension to space and time and it worked but then it only worked for one-loop diagrams and then it went wrong

[3:28] So eventually I said well maybe if I take 3.99 dimensions or 4.01 then everything is formally finite and calculable and there are no contradictions. So all I have to do is take a limit and then go and the number of spacetime dimensions goes to 4.

[3:47] But then I thought, how am I going to explain that to Feldman, because he's very critical. So now I said, well, I have this idea about changing the number of dimensions of spacetime, not by an integer, but by a small fractional number. And much to my surprise, he got immediately enthusiastic right away. And that was for other colleagues as well. They immediately accepted such a wild idea, which I thought was rather crazy.

[4:15] Whereas in contrast, if you talk about quantum mechanics, and you suggest maybe quantum mechanics is just a deterministic theory in disguise, in disguise because there's so much going on in this universe, you can't really check whether it's deterministic or not. But I thought this was a very natural sort of zero attitude you would have towards quantum mechanics. But again, then people come up with lots of objections.

[4:39] But when you propose to someone that there are two or many universes at the same time, some more real than the other, but they're all real, different realities, I find that total nonsense. I can't understand how that works. But very rarely you hear objections against that. You hear only alternatives which are equally crazy. But the idea that the world is just completely deterministic, simple-minded, just like grains of sand,

[5:08] So why do you think that is? Do you think it's because our validation criteria is off or do you think it's because the more fantastic idea, the more it appeals to people? Or is it the more fantastic idea, the more difficult it is to find an error with it?

[5:32] Yes I think it is that with more fantastic ideas you can make noise, you can shout that we now have a fantastically crazy idea and it works or maybe it works to some point but it seems to work and then you are a hero whereas if you propose something very basic, something very mundane, something very ordinary then they say yeah yeah we had that and we don't believe that it's something more complicated.

[6:00] Now, you've also expressed some frustration with quantum physicists in terms of blind spots. You just alluded to it. So regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics, let's flesh that out some more, please. Yes. Well, the

[6:23] The important point is that quantum mechanics only gives statistical answers to any questions as to what will happen when you make such an experiment. And you directly get the statistical answer which is part of the world of possible answers that sounds reasonable. And so quantum mechanics gives you the correct probabilistic predictions. But the real world isn't probabilistic, it's only probabilistic

[6:52] If you don't have all information to be sure that this book is there and that book is there, no, if you just open the cupboard you find all books falling on the floor and you can't predict how they will fall on the floor except they make kind of predictions just as in quantum mechanics where you say no, no, we don't know where this book is going, you don't know where that book is going, but we just know

[7:18] the probability that something happens, and this you can calculate, and this you can check against experiment. Do we get right deviations from the probabilities predicted by quantum mechanics? So, in that sense, the theory is right, but the theory gives completely wrong predictions as to say, where exactly will everything come? Quantum mechanics can only give statistical predictions, and I think

[7:47] Those predictions are totally wrong, but they are closer to the truth than anything else you can predict. And they're closer to the truth because in many cases you cannot make any better predictions. Think of an insurance company. The insurance company is not interested in exactly where and when you made your accident. The insurance company will just want to know how many cars are there, how many people are driving these cars.

[8:12] How many have alcohol in their blood? How many have done this? How many have done that? So they want a statistical answer. They don't want the explicit answers. So I think in the world of science also quantum mechanics will give you the statistical answers and not the true answers. But to me that means that the theory is incorrect. We should basically have a theory which if you

[8:36] Start with a situation where every single particle, every single atom, every single photon is exactly localized the way that it should be, or having the probabilities that it should, having the properties that it should have without any doubt, any uncertainty. Then the CA should predict explicitly where every single particle is going.

[9:01] Now, we don't have such a theory and quantum mechanics is not such a theory, but eventually what I want is to have a theory that gives this kind of predictions. If you knew all the initial data with infinite accuracy, with mathematical precision, then the theory gives you an explicit result that every single particle will only collide in one particular way and all the others are simply not happening.

[9:24] So that's the theory I want for quantum mechanics even though I know very well that nobody will ever be able to use that property in practice. In practice we don't know the initial states so accurately that we don't know how particles will collide so any answer will be as good as any other. So but then quantum mechanics is a perfect ingenious theory that gives you exactly the right probabilities which is what we want in practice anyway. So for practical use it's not so

[9:55] meaningful to search for a theory that predicts everything with infinite prediction. But for me, searching for how such a theory would look like will give me some idea about the ultimate truth, a theory that, like quantum mechanics, gives you very precise probabilities. But if you knew the initial state, it would be infinitely precise. Such a theory has my strong preference.

[10:22] even if we don't even know how to start building such a theory. And that's in the peculiar situation right now that even if you wanted a deterministic theory, it is very hard to design it just from a sketch. We don't know enough.

[10:40] So when you say quantum theory is quote unquote totally wrong, I'm sure firstly, some people may be thinking hidden variables. Is that what this professor is arguing for? Hidden variables have been disproved. We can get to your cellular automata approach shortly. But why would you say that it's totally wrong? Because the counter argument is that it's considerably precise in its predictions and it's been verified to more digits than anything else in any other field of our knowledge.

[11:08] What is wrong is that the theory doesn't ever talk about generally existing situations, which I have a probability one of happening and probability zero of not happening or any other situation is probability zero. Think of two particles in a beam like at CERN. The two particles will hit each other and suppose we knew exactly how these two particles, how many of them will hit and how they will hit and so on.

[11:36] Then still, quantum mechanics gives you a probabilistic outcome. Even though the initial state were precisely defined, then still the theory gives you a statistical answer. And that, according to my intuition, cannot be right. Okay, so the probability distribution is not such that it's zero everywhere except at one place and gives 100? Yes, yes. I see.

[12:06] You said you wanted to ask a question about hidden variables, but what I'm talking about really is hidden variable theory, or rather the philosophy of the hidden variable theory is exactly followed. Except when people try to make computations with hidden variables, they don't follow its own philosophy and that's why they get contradictions which are worse than the contradictions in quantum mechanics. So they say no, that cannot be right.

[12:33] Tell me about this. What's the distinction between hidden variables as people conceptualize it and then the so-called philosophy of hidden variables? What is the philosophy of hidden variables? Well, in principle, it agrees. That's why I call it a philosophy of the hidden variables. The hidden variable itself obeys this philosophical intuition that it should be giving infinitely perfect, infinitely precise predictions. The probabilistic outcome

[13:01] our distributions that we measure in our experiments comes about because we don't know well enough how to do any calculations that will give you a more precise result. It's the same like when you in the weather forecast you predict there will be clouds there, there will be rain there, but we cannot possibly predict where every single rain drop will be falling, how exactly the clouds will be shaped and so on. Of course we cannot do that, that's much too hard, but it doesn't mean that the

[13:31] The meteorologist who makes this prediction doesn't try to predict as accurately as he can what the shapes of the clouds will be and so on. But as you know, of course, they're not far from getting very precise theories about that. So there are, broadly speaking, two interpretations of the wave function. One is called psi-ontic.

[13:58] And then another is called Psi epistemic. And for people who have vaguely heard these terms, ontic refers to something existing in reality and then epistemic has to do with our knowledge of it. So Psi ontic, people who believe the wave function is real tend to be Everettians, for instance. And then Psi epistemics, I assume you would qualify as such.

[14:22] And then the counter argument would be, well, what about the PBR theorem? So there are loopholes. Can you speak about these loopholes, please? And also, I would love to know your view on many worlds. It's basically the same that many worlds is as untrue as the other theories of quantum mechanics, where you have several realities. But the many world series, the extreme logical

[14:51] conclusion from the many worlds theory that every single outcome is possible with a certain quantum probability. I'm saying you would expect even a deterministic theory to give such predictions because you are not able to do every computation as accurately as you want.

[15:14] So even if you have a deterministic theory, then still you would only be able to make statistical predictions. So you have to take the complete world of all possible states. That's your in state, your initial state. The final state will also be a distribution of certain, of infinitely many possibilities. And your theory is better if these probability distributions look more similar to the reality.

[15:43] That's the kind of theory which one could call hidden variable theories and I agree that that's basically the main idea that there are variables that we cannot identify exactly today but which happen only with certainty, never with a distribution of superposition of possibilities but only single sharp states.

[16:13] Roger Penrose is also known for saying quantum theory is wrong. Note, I also spoke to Roger Penrose about this very topic. Link in the description. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. I say this very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. Einstein and Schrodinger were much more polite. They said it was incomplete. Incomplete means wrong. Well, you're telling it like it is. We've got to change it so it's wrong.

[16:40] And I'm curious, given that you're both Nobel Prize winners who believe quantum theory is incomplete, which is how I would characterize it, just so you know. Have you ever had a conversation with Penrose about this? Yes, very often I disagree with him and there are basic issues. But his formulation is a bit vague as to what it exactly means. But he has many theories that I don't believe in. But

[17:07] My only belief is that the ultimate theory of nature, whatever it looks like, has only variables, like hidden variables, and everything that happens happens with certainty. This happens, that does not happen, but there's nothing in between. There's never a superposition between a dead cat and a live cat, for instance. That's the famous example where you bring quantum mechanics to the extreme. No, I would think,

[17:30] We don't know what the theory will predict, whether the cat will die, whether the cat will survive. We don't know that. That's very, very hard. But in principle, the theory should predict whether the cat will be alive or not. And the cat will not be in a superposition. That's only because our understanding today of the true laws of nature is too uncertain and too imprecise to be able to do any better than saying that the cat will have

[17:57] So I know we spoke briefly off air, and I want to reference something. This is a quotation from you, I believe. I hope I wrote this down correctly. My claim is that if we ever hit the true equations, there will be no superposition any longer. Yes. So this is what you're referring to. That's what I'm saying. Yes.

[18:27] Okay, please expand on that. So why would it be that if you found the true equations there would be no superposition? Well, I remember your first question was about why do people not believe the easy things and why do they have such more difficulty, less difficulty with the, let's say it again. In your first question, you

[18:55] I talked about how the more outlandish and zany the theory, the more it's accepted, at least it's cognitively easy for a physicist to not find objections with it. The thing that people now always put in doubt is, to me, the far most obvious situation. I think that grains of sand are particles just like planets and stars or rocks or atoms or molecules. They're all particles and they all obey equations.

[19:24] Okay, the equation of the molecules and the atoms is a bit different, but basically it should be the same, that is to say there are variables which determine what it will do next. But an atom or molecule is much more complicated than what people think. It's not just that the molecule consists of so many atoms and then they are in a wave function and that's it. No, they are not in a wave function. There are things there which I don't know even whether they are atoms or molecules, but something else.

[19:51] and they only obey equations that lead to certain outcomes if you know the initial states with infinite certainty. That holds for rocks, for sand, for atoms and molecules and elementary particles and photons and neutrinos, you name it all, they are all only obeying deterministic laws. I would find this the most obvious

[20:16] Just a moment. Don't go anywhere.

[20:46] I see you inching away. Don't be like the economy. Instead, read The Economist. I thought all The Economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself, personally, is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets.

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[23:02] We also spoke off air about quantum mechanics as a language and I'm not sure what that meant so maybe that's related to your newest approach. You use the word epistemic. You use the word epistemic which is that it describes things and the wave function is epistemic.

[23:30] That's exactly what it is, I believe. It's because we haven't got anything better than that wave function. So let's assume that wave function is a way to describe the probability distributions that will come out of your experiment. The real reason why you get probabilistic distributions will be that we don't understand and we don't have the initial state with infinite position. Which is what you would need to get a precise non-probabilistic answer, but just a certain answer as to what is happening.

[24:01] Okay, so why don't we get to your cellular automaton approach? And why don't you walk us through how it was initially and then what it's evolved to now? It didn't change very much. The original idea was that the world, although it looks like a probabilistic world, where notions as temperature and entropy are very well defined, better defined than many of the deterministic notions of particles and molecules,

[24:31] And so the cellular automaton is a collection of cellular automata which are all influencing each other but basically they are data which only influence each other when they are nearest neighbors. So the position of a thing is very important because it can only affect its neighbors. It cannot affect directly things that are further away than a few fundamental distances, steps in fundamental distances. So

[25:01] is typically what you get in a pinball machine, although the pinball machine is designed to generate random numbers, but if you could predict with infinite precision what is happening to these balls in the machine, then they all go in a predictable orbit, they go down in the machine. And the rest depends on details that are too difficult for us now to calculate, that's what the machine is made for. But in principle, everything should be predictable.

[25:29] and in the cellular automaton you build more basically on that idea but now you say let's take the rules about how one object affects its neighbor let's suppose those rules are completely fixed by very simple

[25:48] So I could show on screen right now, just for the viewers, John Conway's Game of Life as an example. That's a nice example, except it's not reversible in time. Whereas the real world as you see it, seems to be

[26:17] I would emphasize seems to be reversible in time. That is to say, if you have something happening, the same event happening backwards in time, if you make a movie of me talking but you show a movie backwards in time, then the same equations are obeyed. Well, actually the situation is a little bit more difficult. You have to replace particles by antiparticles and some

[26:41] and mirror particles as well. But that's the detail. The important point of the automaton, and that is probably important if you want to impose quantum mechanics. If you want to say that this thing actually can be turned into quantum mechanics. And probably what you want is to have a time-reversible set of laws. The set of laws can be extremely simple because you only need to say what happens when a particle sees another one at his neighbour.

[27:11] And if you know where all the particles are situated, you're going to have waves that go through this situation. You can make it look as complicated as the real world. And that is very important. I think the real world to me does not look any more complicated than this, except that for the real world, I don't know the equations and I'm not going to find out anymore in my lifetime.

[27:35] So we don't know the equations but maybe one day physicists will guess the equations and from that guess they'll discover that not only the equations seem to agree more or less with what they know experimentally but it can also predict what kind of particles this will produce. Those particles are

[27:59] Phenomena that you can also describe in this automata. Particles are quanta of energy. That's the most precise definition. Not infinite precise, but very precise definition of a particle is that it is a quantum of energy. And energy is something you can define classically, even though it's not quite deterministic. And that's an important complication in the whole theory.

[28:23] But basically we have time, we have energy, we have momentum, we have all the properties of the particles and they all interact in a completely fixed, described way. If these fixed laws only act on integers and on fixed time steps, then everything can be put in a computer because a computer also works with infinite

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[29:21] only discrete numbers and discrete time steps, but then the computer can be extremely accurate as well. Sometimes it may make a mistake because they have fluctuations, but not very often. So most computers then agree very precisely as a result what the outcome of an experiment will be. There's a good reason to suspect that such a theory could also predict that actually before we understand how things happen in practice,

[29:50] What we will see is that there are things that look very much like the particles that particle physicists have been talking about for years now, so-called standard model relevant to particles. The standard model is a quantum model, but as a quantum model it

[30:07] It gives you very precise statistical predictions which can be measured and checked with experiment and you find that the standard model today is the best possible way we can describe these particles. So the next step would be if you have a discrete model like the cellular automata that they should reproduce the same world of standard model particles.

[30:29] and now the fact that you can't accept any non-integent numbers in the standard model automaton also means that when these standard models particles interact, they collide and they go away in different directions, then this whole phenomenon of the collision will be described by integer numbers only. And that's very interesting from the point of view of standard model physicists, because that sort of standard model does not have, it also has

[30:58] Numbers of pi floating around are numbers which are not very precisely known, but certainly they can fill a complete continuum of constants of nature in the standard model. This continuum should be broken up, and that's what my theory would predict. The likely models, the models that work in practice, will have only integers even in their coupling strengths.

[31:24] And that is not as we understand the particles now, but something one might expect in the distant future to be discovered, that yes, you can also compute how all the particles interact with integers. So is discreteness important? Is it extremely important? So the reason is that you could have the universe following rules that go stepwise. Well, I guess when I say stepwise,

[31:52] That is discrete, but what I was going to say is there could still be some dependence on real numbers, which are continuous. So, for instance, one of the updating rules could rely on pi, all of the digits of pi. So is the discreteness through and through important?

[32:10] I think yes, because if you don't have discreteness, but a continuum of possibilities, the continuous numbers are the real numbers. But the real numbers, every single real number is only specified if you have specified infinite number decimal places. That's very hard to realize in a finite model like the cellular automaton. So I don't believe in the existence of real numbers in physics. Well, that's very strange because everything in physics today

[32:38] seems to be controlled by real numbers. So why am I saying that? I'm saying that this may hold only in this idealized model of theory, which hasn't been discovered at all now, which you don't know of any of the details how they work. But if we find the details, my prediction would be those details will only depend on integers, not even rationals, because a rational number can also have infinitely many values.

[33:06] No, only integers have finite values and the integers shouldn't be too big also. They should be between 1 and 2 perhaps or between 1 and 137 or something like that. But finite numbers and only then can your model be deterministic without ever needing to make statistical approximations. Whereas with real numbers you never know for sure whether the real numbers will hit each other or not when two particles collide with different

[33:34] Impact parameter which is controlled by a real number. If those real numbers are different, then at one situation the particles will collide, in the other case they will not collide. But it will be very hard to make a theory where all this will come out with certainty only. And that's the basic demand I have for the future theory is, it will only be based on certainties.

[33:57] Well, we don't understand anything today, so today's science is without certainties. Fine, so we have work to do as a scientist, we have to work to do to find this theory which only contains certainties and therefore it may only contain integer numbers. Even the time steps, but time is one possible exception that things might go like when you have embroidery if you

[34:23] have a needle and a thread and the needle goes to and fro, then the needle will follow a continuous orbit and then, depending on that continuous orbit, the knots that you create are discrete tiles and only indicated with integer numbers. In that way, time is formally real, but this real number won't play a role in the predictions that you make. Only the position of the particle is a function of time.

[34:52] So there are two key people that come to mind that have worked on super determinism, a word which I don't think we've said yet, but we're going to get to. And you're a large proponent of super determinism. The other two are Tim Palmer and Sabine Haassenfelder. Tim Palmer has

[35:21] rational quantum mechanics so i don't know if you've looked into that but if you have i would like to know what your thoughts are well i think it's a typical example of someone going very far in my direction yes but not as far as i am because i'm saying that the numbers should never be rational because then you have still an infinite number of possibilities there should be numbers determined by rules

[35:50] Of course a rational number is a numerator divided by a denominator. So yes, those are integers. So if the rational numbers he talks about are really numerators and denominators, but themselves are only carrying integer numbers, even integer numbers which are restricted, then beautiful inside. But so Palmer is not precisely

[36:12] Now, with this discreteness, do you have to have a preferred foliation in order to describe this discreteness in your model, or is the discreteness something else that isn't exactly space-time discreteness?

[36:36] That's the hard part of the question. We have Einstein's equations. We have curvature of space and time. So that will usually, any theory that uses that will have to have such sheets. And how to make those discretized is very difficult. But there is a theory such as loop quantum gravity that tries to do something of that sort.

[37:02] So they have my sympathy, but again, they're not going far enough to my taste in determinism. Steven Wolfram is another person who doesn't go into super determinism, but also has cellular automata. So you're a unique blend. I want to get to how lonely it feels at another question, but it would be great to talk about the early 2000 Steven, because now the Steven is hypergraph Steven. But earlier it was cellular automata Steven.

[37:31] What is the difference between your approach and his? And did his influence yours or did yours influence his? Or was it independent? Maybe not quite independent. I think he was much earlier in looking at cellular automata than I am. So if there's any, what is it? Causal priority? Priority, then it belongs to him because he worked very much earlier with cellular automata.

[38:00] I remember the game of life as an example, but that has absorption and that's not really as deterministic as I wanted. But yes, I think that Palmer's ideas and mine are very close, but they're just not quite exactly the same. So again, when we were speaking off air,

[38:30] We talked about how many people send you their theory of everything or just their theories on physics. And most of it, it's not terribly useful to you. There was a diamond in the rough though, from Edward Fredkin, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Here's one of the exceptions to the rule. And the rule is basically that these people who come with their own crazy idea, their ideas are too crazy. And they're

[39:00] They show a lack of understanding of what already scientists know about the world. What scientists know is that the standard model of the particles works extremely well. That cannot be an accident, so we want to use that. We don't want to throw away the standard model before we have anything better.

[39:19] Eventually, the model is not infinitely good. It has some weak spots. We all know that. Scientists are aware of this. They try to repair the weak spots, but they don't try to overthrow the standard model entirely, because there's so much good and sound science that went into it. So the idea is, what is the mathematics that you need to compare

[39:48] You sell an automaton with a standard model or similar models. Whereas the boundary, is there any boundary? I don't believe there is one, but it looks like it. And of course then you get the question that space and time are curved according to Einstein. That again also is something we know with practical certainty because there have been many observations that have been made that confirm Einstein's theory. So that is not the point to start

[40:18] So those things you want to keep, you want to keep general relativity, you want to keep the standard model. The first thing to drop would be the non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. But then we have to make many more steps to see how the existing understanding of the world as you know it, how this becomes completely folded into a useful theory.

[40:50] Professor, something I don't understand is if this approach, your cellular automata approach, depends so sensitively on initial conditions such that any stochasticity that we perceive can always be said to be just ignorance, then given the initial conditions aren't accessible to us in anything that resembles the precision I imagine you'd require, how could you possibly falsify your theory?

[41:17] I think that's going to be very hard, certainly for the time being, but as long as the theory isn't completely understood, like we don't know exactly the automaton equations that we want to obey, so as long as that's the case, the field theory has not been even remotely

[41:40] proven to be correct only if the theory would start to make predictions about standard model interactions for instance the masses of the neutrinos that you don't know very well today and the mass ratio relation between other particles that we can measure but not calculate are not in terms of features of the theory that you completely understand as long as that's the case you can't

[42:08] I hope however that maybe with the use of artificial intelligence there is more intelligence than the average human being, much more than maybe machines will find the way to uncover such a subtle automaton. Maybe the machine will know

[42:37] how to the quantum field theory of many many particles and why they can be effectively the way a cellular automaton exhibits itself. Because I see lots of relations between a quantum theory of really quantum theory of quantum particles on the one hand and a cellular automaton on the other. So I see that relation and that's where I differ from Wolfram. Wolfram didn't really ask the question how come

[43:07] that our world looks like some cellular automaton in disguise and it tries many examples but I'm sure that by trying just a model of this sort you won't get to the truth. The truth is too complicated. So I believe that we have to combine the work from experimental scientists to measure all the properties of the standard model as accurately as they can and then theoreticians ask why are these

[43:35] These different parameters that characterize the theory, why they relate with these particular ratios, where do these numbers come from, then maybe one day someone will find, oh, but this number I can recognize from the cellular automaton. It's that number. So a famous number of that sort is to find such a constant in electromagnetism. The ratio between the electric charge and smaller fundamental constants

[44:05] If you square that, then you get 1 over 137. But that number has many more decimal places behind the zero and the comma. That's a famous number that nobody can compute, but it exists, it can be measured very accurately, but we don't know how to compute that number. And the cellular automaton, if it's worth that name, should be able to compute where that number comes from and what it is.

[44:35] Okay, this sounds like a great time to talk about what is super determinism and how is it contrasted with regular determinism. Well, it's not determinism as bitten by a radioactive spider. So what is determinism and how does that contrast with super determinism? I think different people have different interpretations as to what super determinism should mean.

[45:01] and the problem is it's something that may be beyond super determinism but you can think of that in two ways. I think that the laws of nature are conspiring with each other such that that we are made to believe that quantum mechanics is real whereas reality is just a statistical phenomenon but it can also just mean that

[45:28] Determinism occurs at all levels in principle, so not only at the level of atoms and molecules but also bigger things like larger biological molecules or chemistry or even small particles and then eventually large particles, stars, universes, they all should be

[45:48] I go to the extreme, I think in principle we have completely deterministic equations. In practice we do not have the illusion that we will ever be able, even the AI people will not be able to calculate how things will evolve exactly. That will be far too complicated ever to achieve.

[46:12] But we can then believe that the world has that determinism built in those laws as well, even if we can't ever derive the laws with precision. So if a super determinism means that, then I'm totally behind it, that I cannot expect anything else, that the entire world is controlled by equations that only say yes or no.

[46:36] And whenever it answers a question, it never says maybe, it never gives you a probability distribution with probabilities different from zero or one. And if that is a super determinism means that I'm totally in favor of it. Sometimes people believe that super determinism means that, okay, the world is deterministic, but the answer is God's.

[46:58] Pulling some switches to make things happen the way you are caught into thinking that quantum mechanics is the true theory or something of that sort. Some mysterious intervention of a divine ghost of something that makes things happen that otherwise would not be understandable. If that is not super determinism means then that's not what I believe at all.

[47:23] So you're much more in line with Einstein who believed God doesn't play dice. I think Einstein would agree with me here. I would agree with Einstein. He was the first.

[47:44] Okay, so super determinism is nothing over and above determinism. It's actually just determinism through and through. So most people, they think, well, Newton's laws are deterministic. There's some wiggle room there with Norton's dome. Super determinism is determinism all the way. Yes. But how complicated this thing is that you're looking at in principle, its laws are deterministic.

[48:05] The subtlety here is that there's Bell's theorem, which seems to exclude determinism and one of the loopholes or one of the assumptions is statistical independence. So super determinism is usually spoken about as taking statistical dependence. So can you please explain what statistical independence is, why it's relevant to Bell's theorem and then where you land on it? Well,

[48:31] I think Bell, with all respect, he was a very nice person and modest and he had just his ideas and he tried to prove, to understand how determinism works and then he found that in his theories the opposite is true, so that determinism didn't work for his theories. But I think he made a very elementary error, I would say, mistake. And that's to say that things that happened in the past have nothing to do with what happened at the present.

[49:00] So Bob and Alice, his two observers in his experiment, the Duncan experiment, but still it's an experiment. Bob and Alice, they decide the last split second what to measure, whether it's a spin up inside his action or down or whatever. Or you could talk about photons, you could talk about spinors anyway. But

[49:27] Bell assumed that the decisions made by Bob and Alice to measure something is independent of what happened in the past. And my reaction was, well, I first didn't really see clearly what he was trying to say. But then I realized what he was trying to say is something that cannot be true. That Bob and Alice cannot change their mind without something happening in the past that caused them to change their minds.

[49:55] And if you do think so, then you have assumed that Bob and Alice do something without any explanation in the past. But that's precisely what my ideas about super determinism, or determinism, or super determinism, whatever, says, that not everything we do is also controlled by the same theory. So our decisions to measure this, to measure that, to measure that, also depends on what happened in the past. And

[50:22] If so, if Bell says the opposite and he needed that the opposite of that, he needed that the decision of Bob and I to measure something is independent of what the atoms did in the distant past. Just because he needed that, I say, well, that disproves his approach as being anything else.

[50:42] Anything that would disprove the indeterminism or disprove the determinism of quantum mechanics. No, he made an assumption which you cannot hold. If you believe in determinism, you have to believe in super determinism all the way. And that's what he didn't do. Now, what about the critique that super determinism makes experimental science meaningless?

[51:10] It makes experimental science harder, but not meaningless. Why not? I mean, we're doing science all the way and the interpretation of the quantum equations that we get is just something else. It means that the ultimate source of the quantum equations is not what people think they are. It's not that there are many realities.

[51:35] And I think actually Bell also showed that because he made this assumption that these particles in the distant past can have any probabilistic distribution regardless as to what the decisions are that Bob and Alice make. No, as soon as Bob and Alice make a decision, you can point out in a completely deterministic theory, you can point exactly which atom in the past has made Bob and Alice to change their settings of their measurement.

[52:07] So okay, allow me to be precise. I'll give some example. Let's suppose you have a thousand mice. Some of these mice are going to be predisposed to cancer and some are not. And we just don't know which

[52:22] One of these mice are predisposed, so we just are going to randomly divide them. And how do we randomly divide them? Well, we pick the two millionth digit of pie and we say if that digit is odd, then this mouse here, this mouse right up front will go to the left in one group. And then if the digit is even, then the mouse will go to the right and we just keep sorting based on, OK, now the three millionth digit of pie, now the four millionth and so on.

[52:49] So standard statistics would say that each group would have roughly the same percentage of cancer-prone mice. If we later see more cancer in one group that smokes, say we make these mice smoke, so we give them cigarettes or what have you, then we conclude that smoking causes cancer. If we deny statistical independence, it means that somehow these mice could have conspired, not the mice themselves, but somehow the universe conspired such that

[53:18] The smoking group just happened to get more cancer prone mice in it. And I remember that tobacco companies use this to say that this is one of the reasons why smoking doesn't necessarily cause cancer. So how does statistical independence not fall prey to these sorts of arguments? Because Alice and Bob could choose their measurement settings based on coins or quantum

[53:47] Well, I think what one may well expect from a deterministic theory is that the ratios of events are more or less the way you expect them. So when you try to understand how the deterministic theory works,

[54:16] You will find it's far too complicated to calculate exactly what happens. So we can't talk about exactly what will happen when exactly you do your experiment. The millionth mouse goes in that direction, the one millionth first mouse goes in that direction. If that's what you do, then we know very well that we will never be able to compute within this position in such a deterministic world what will happen. So at some point one has to make an assumption

[54:46] And the assumptions must sound reasonable. The assumption will be that all these mice are controlled by the same biological rules as others. Some mice will be immune against or more immune against a disease that gives them cancer. Others will be more sensitive to cancer cells. But you can compute all these things from the model more easily than to compute literally what every single mouse will do, what will happen to it.

[55:17] and the same holds for insurance companies. Insurance companies never worry about whether the atoms which were taking the place, whether the car accident would take place, that those atoms were in the wrong position, he won't blame the atoms. They say well they can be in any position, but there are so many of such initial states that we can use to

[55:43] to see that randomness does enter into our world, whether we like it or not. So even in a deterministic theory, you have randomness in practice. And so then that wipes away the mouse problem, because then you say, well, every mouse is controlled by random phenomena anyway. My deterministic theory of the deterministic world will give a prediction if it

[56:13] could be handled in the position but we can't and we never will be so we are so far away from that situation that we can make such measurements that the next best thing is to use the biological arguments to see that someone in the insurance company is cheating and so on and so forth even name all sorts of reasons for one mouse to die sooner than another mouse or a cat being survived or death

[56:43] that in practice you never need to worry that this is going to be contradicting the deterministic theory.

[56:52] OK, so this is a great point for people who just happened to skip forward to this point in the conversation. Most of the groundwork has been laid. Why don't you just outline what is your view of quantum mechanics? What is going on? What is the cellular automata approach? Now, I know you've already talked about it, but I'm just saying let's recapitulate it. So what is standard quantum theory say? And then what does your approach say? Well, there was my ideas. I was going with any say.

[57:19] is that there is a way to identify parameters. We call them hidden variables. You can call them anything you like. Let's call it hidden variable because that has been mostly debated in the past. There are variables, let's call them hidden variables, which can only take the value yes or no, but nothing in between. Everything is determined by certain laws.

[57:44] In principle, it would be possible to compute what such a model does in this infinite position. In practice, of course, it's nearly never possible. Even if you have an experiment at CERN and two beams of particles hit each other, no matter how sharp you focus one beam on the other beam, you still get some possibility of

[58:08] of arbitrary fluctuations that you don't have under control sufficient to make that what happens after the collision is all possibilities. The particle can go in all directions with different probabilities by the way there might be correlations such that they give you a small peak in your observations such a peak might be the effect of a new particle these things also happen but

[58:31] But the theory will not work better than ordinary quantum mechanics in the best of all possible worlds. So the theory cannot be used to make better quantum mechanical calculations. But it can be used to understand what the phenomena are and why the phenomena are there. Why are there mindset that die more easily from smoking cigarettes and others not?

[59:01] and so on. So those questions you have to answer not by being a scientist but by being a biologist or a doctor who is investigating with all precision as he can to see what are the outcomes of this experiment, what are the spreadings, what can happen and what can you do. That is not going to be any better with the deterministic theory.

[59:27] But what will be done better is that you can understand where all these laws come from. In particular, the standard model of elementary particles is the first in line to be researched using statistical, using deterministic phenomena.

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[60:18] So professor, since you have such interesting views on or differing views on quantum mechanics, do you have any differing views on quantum gravity? So for instance, whatever the mainline approaches are, do you disagree with them at some fundamental level? Is there something that restricts what the mainline approaches would be if cellular automata were true? No, I think it's basically in craft to

[60:46] to give a different role to gravity than to all the other interactions. So normally we have electromagnetism, the terms how particles collide, sometimes it is strong and weak forces, but gravity is one of these other forces. It happens to be a lot weaker than the others, but in principle, gravity should be controlled by exactly the same situation.

[61:10] There are particles called gravitons, there are black holes, all these other things which can happen in gravitational theory. They are all controlled by deterministic laws, which will be very difficult in the case of gravity. It really is very difficult even to think of how deterministic laws could be working in this case. So yes, this is a difficult problem, but I don't see why it should be impossible. There's no no-go theorem that no, you can't do that.

[61:39] I think you have to be very intelligent, very smart and very resourceful and perhaps help with very clever experiments to see how this works, how you can bridge the gap between the

[62:08] There's no doubt in my mind that you have to use the same techniques of quantum mechanics in both cases. So yes, that means quantum gravity as such works, classical gravity only works in the cases where the quantum effects are insignificant, you can't see them, but they are there and they are there because there are still statistical phenomena that have taken place every now and then.

[62:37] Okay, so i interviewed claudia dirham of massive gravity interview place on screen and she had this advice to her students which is that sure there may be no go theorems.

[62:49] You should take them seriously, but don't take them as a total no, because there are ways to evade them. And her massive graviton had a specific potential that removes or decouples the ghosts at all orders. Also, there's a Weinberg Witten theorem, which she evades because she has a massive graviton. Do you give similar advice to your students that if you're violating some sacred assumption, well,

[63:15] Yes, you should be concerned about it, but don't be too concerned. You can find your way around it. I would certainly say don't be too concerned about it, quite the opposite. If your theory disagrees strongly with the existing opinion about the situation, maybe it's a good idea to start to study it, because then not so many people have studied the opposite possibility yet. But in reality, you have to realize that most likely

[63:44] The correct answers, as history has shown, most likely the correct answers are by combining different phenomena. Like in the case of Maxwell, it was combining electricity and magnetism as one theory. So that was a very famous example. But there are other examples where you can see where gravity and elementary particles meet each other. For instance, the gravitons. They will be difficult or impossible to observe.

[64:12] But in theory, they are there and they are just like photons. In many respects, they look very much like photons. And you can possibly learn new things, particularly if you take one step backwards. And I also have a strong advice for students. If you don't understand something and you don't believe that what you read in the books makes sense, just make a step backwards.

[64:42] Try to ask the question, why do people say these things in the first place? Can it be that they didn't listen to each other? If they listened to each other, they would realize that they both made some mistakes or some make bigger mistakes than others. We all make mistakes, so take that into account and don't let yourself get scared away from viewpoints which might be more useful

[65:09] by getting in a combination of different theories together in one theory. That is often a sign that you might be on a new track, which is important. But many students like to do like their masters like disbelieve everything quantum gravity doesn't exist or something like that. I don't know what such a theory looks like, but it doesn't look like the theory I would like to defend.

[65:36] Do you find that many of the master's students are the ones with ideas that are trying to discard most of standard physics and reformulate everything? Or do you find that's mostly what characterizes your inbox compared to your master's students? No, I think that is what happens when you begin as a physics student. And that are the good students. They doubt on everything they learn. They say it could be different. Let's assume that what this teacher says is not true.

[66:07] Why did he say this? And then some do long calculations, some do short calculations, but usually when they did the calculations, they said, yes, actually this teacher wasn't so bad after all. He is right. And what I first thought didn't hold. So you have to understand, that's the way you have to understand nature. So try to take things that seem to be not related, yet giving different answers to different scenarios.

[66:36] Let's try to see if we can find a common denominator, a theory that works for both of them. So that would be one certain, many certain alleys of that sort that you can still investigate. If I understood correctly from our conversation off air,

[66:57] You suggested that some composite particles, sorry, that some of what we think of as elementary particles may be confined to composite particles, but I'm not sure if I misunderstood that. Well, the question is, again, in the other direction, what makes a particle elementary? And I was once also having a discussion of people trying to define elementary particles as opposed to composite particles.

[67:27] My immediate answer was well a composite particle is composite if it makes sense if it's useful to consider it as such. It's elementary if you can't identify any composite ingredients of the particle anymore then it's an elementary particle such as the photon is basically elementary the graviton will be basically elementary particles but

[67:50] You cannot try to make such definitions with infinite precision. If you use infinite precision, you know that the photon every now and then, you look like an electron to electron, and then come back again. So, the things which first look easy at one step, they become more complicated after more steps. But still, physics is a science where there's no such certainty today.

[68:19] There's no such certainty as I would like to see, but I want to work my way to theories which have more certainty built in than normally. And that I think is an interesting alley to investigate today. Can you make theories which are more certain than others? And I found a very simple theory of that sort. I call it the grandfather's clock, a pendulum clock.

[68:45] So a pendulum has a pendulum which goes one per second. It makes a full twist here. And then it has some gears in them. And while the gears are rotating, the pendulum does this. And I'm saying, yes, this is a model that has periodic behavior and it has linear behavior in how the hands of the flocks move continuously.

[69:10] Both obey the same quantum laws. So you have a single set of quantum equations for the entire pendulum clock. And the nice thing about the pendulum clock is that on one end it has an oscillator, but it's a quantum oscillator. Quantum oscillators are known for having discretized energy levels and it's typically a quantum situation. But nevertheless, the entire model has also classical behavior. The hands of the clock move classically.

[69:39] So now you have a collision between deterministic theories and quantum theories in one object, the pendulum clock, which is why I like the name pendulum clock, although you don't have to put all the ornamentations on it. It's still a thing that combines quantum mechanics with deterministic behavior. My belief is that you can do that with quantum mechanics itself.

[70:07] And there are many pendulum clocks more complicated than the one that you normally have in your room. And so this would be the beginning of a research into completely deterministic theories which look quantum mechanical at first sight. So, Professor, speaking of quantum mechanical, I want to use that word quantum because we talked about quantum clones before.

[70:36] It's more recent work of yours. So there's work by Neil Turok and Lathan Boyle about black hole horizons acting as mirrors. And you also have a theory of mirrors at the horizon. So please talk about that and how yours is distinguished from their model. Yeah, I don't know if this works. Let me see. Oh, perfect. Great. This describes a black hole.

[71:07] and the feature is the black hole is a regional space time which is accelerated and when it is accelerated it has horizons the dark blue lines are horizons the other arrows are particles going into the black hole and this is a particle coming out of a black hole and this is the way I think one should understand how black holes behave in practice but

[71:35] There's a mapping between the future horizon to the past and that preserves unitarity. So did that? No, it is not valid. The whole thing is, yes, you want to get not to disobey unitarity or determinism. So now when people draw a black hole, they say, yes, but there's a similar space at the other side. Let me quickly draw it. There's another.

[72:04] There's another universe at the other side here. Great. And so when you have data in this whole system, you have data here and you have data there. However, this data there cannot be realistic, because if that were a genuine thing, and according to the equations, this space here looks exactly identical to that one.

[72:27] so this looks like a clone of that but normally when you do physics it isn't a clone because you can throw them in a particle here without throwing in a particle here but you can also say well maybe if you throw in a particle here then automatically an anti-observer anti-physicist will also throw a particle in here so then I say this is exactly a clone of that that means you can leave away this green region altogether so I talk about the single

[72:57] black hole now and maybe that is enough to describe all the data that are there. The advantage of that is that when you do this calculation now when determinism takes place in this one universe then determinism takes place in the other one as well. In fact this whole model if this is just a clone of that the whole thing can be called deterministic. If this is a separate universe it's going to be very hard because these particles will disappear in two

[73:26] into the infinite future and these particles come from the past long ago. But it's very difficult to say that this particle that gets out depends on the particle that moves in and that's what you want in a good theory. So determinism is helped by identifying these two regions and the side effect of that is that by identifying the two regions you make that the entropy

[73:52] and other properties of the particles here is only half of what you thought it was. The entropy is much larger. Now, temperature is a function of entropy in this model. So if you multiply the number of universes or you decrease the number of universes by a factor two, you increase the temperature in both of them by a factor two. So this also predicts a factor two difference from the usual outcome that people got out of these calculations.

[74:23] So the Hawking temperature in your model would be times two of what the ordinary calculation is. This makes it even distinguishable experimentally potentially if we can get close enough to a black hole and measure its temperature and so on. It will be very hard because in practice such black holes will be very far away if they exist at all in our universe because we cannot

[74:43] So what you're saying is that when a particle is incoming into a black hole, it's not that that particle then appears somehow in the past because that would create a time like a closed time like curve. It's more subtle than that.

[75:12] both the in and the outgoing particle will go through a quantum regime. And right when they both go through this point, then the laws which are obviously correct here and obviously correct here are not obviously correct at this point. Something else is happening there and that saves us, that makes the theory useful again, because all these particles will, if you just let time do its work, these outgoing particles come out much later, they will come out from this point, and the in-going particles

[75:42] So paint the picture for the audience member who's wondering, okay, if I

[76:09] The thing is that the physics happening here

[76:34] on this one and on that universe is not really physical at all because the physics is just basically this half where you have ingoing particles going in here and outgoing particles going out here what they do in between has anything to do with it it's a boundary condition of this horizon this horizon is such that if you enter it here you'll

[76:55] Get out there. But there's something very important in that change. It's the position of this particle which turns into momentum of that particle. There's a very strange kind of mix-up between position and momentum. But just in accordance with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that's what you must have. And then the theory works extremely well, I believe. But you should not, you cannot even ask the question what happens when you go through it. No.

[77:22] So then there's no information paradox? There's no information paradox. Except perhaps the black hole is not exactly what you think it is. That's usually the answer in physics, in many branches of physics. You're only getting a successful theory if you

[77:52] This doesn't completely eliminate singularities. You get conical singularities, no? Yes. So why is that an improvement? It isn't. At first sight, it means that there's something very basically going wrong.

[78:22] at this point, because when you say that this is a clone of that, then it means that you actually have to fold out a piece of paper double. Can you lift up the paper? If you don't mind, just lift it up, just so that the audience can see it some more. Yeah, perfect.

[78:47] So now I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh no, that's fine. You were talking about the singularity and you were talking about how you have to fold the paper. Yes, if you fold the paper you get like when you have a bag of french fries, then at this point where they're all collected,

[79:08] There's a singularity. It's a very mild singularity. You can undo it by making space-time a little more inaccurate here, and then the singularity disappears. But in the limit that you have to our description now, this looks like a singularity. That's called the conical singularity. That singularity, however, is the one that already occurs in ordinary string theory. String theories have all the singularities as very mild singularities at such a point where two strings interact.

[79:37] and yeah or actually it's the string itself the position of the string itself also is a singularity but those are usually much milder because the string coupling constant is much smaller so this is like a string between the very strong string coupling constant right right it's the euclidean string or is it the thing that string theorists talk about but it's very similar to the thing string theorists talk about

[80:06] Now this factor of two, by the way, does that factor survive if the back reaction is non-perturbative? Like fully non-perturbative? Or is it independent of that? It's independent of that. I think the description I have here is very much like a zero-order description if you throw away the higher order correction terms. There will be correction terms, but very small. So they don't take away the basic properties of the theory. I see.

[80:35] Thank you so much, Professor. I know that you have to get going. Why don't we talk about what you're working on these days? What's new? What's going on in your life? Where are you headed research wise? It is a black hole problem because the model I have right now is not accurate enough. It's accurate, I believe, but some of the details are not very well understood. In particular, this conical singularity at the origin. I want to understand it better.

[81:04] And I want to also understand how to confront it with the particles of the standard model to see how they interact with the black hole. I want that to be very precisely described by some perturbative theory. But when you write down perturbation expansion, you have to say, perturbation in what? What is a small parameter?

[81:24] and usually that is the small parameter is that the masses of the standard model particles are much much lighter than the masses of the black holes that you're looking at and that means that in all our situations you will be very precise in saying that the first order calculation is probably far more dominant than any of the others but I want to have this ready in the form of a textbook where I say this textbook has the same kind of introduction as any textbook in quantum field theory

[81:54] In the old days, quantum field theory was a very difficult subject, it needed to be explained in detail how it works. This is also a difficult subject, it has to be explained in detail how it works, but there will be no doubt that the description is correct. You can always doubt whether the entire theory is correct, and that's allowed, you can always ask nasty questions, and they will be asked nasty questions, but in principle I want to get it as clear as I can get the whole theory.

[82:22] Did you have a talk in Marseille about asymptotic freedom? Yes, that's an interesting thing that happened that we were in Montaigne and I already knew Professor Kurt Simancic, a very nice person, a very good thinker. He was doing very smart mathematics, which was very difficult for people to understand. But

[82:51] We happened to meet each other at that conference, it was a few years after. Here I learned lots of things from him at his Cargése school. But I was again in Marseille and there he was and when we came out of the plane we realized we had both been using the same airplane at the airport of Marseille. And there we asked each other what we were doing and he said

[83:20] working on theories that have the wrong sign of the coupling constant. Naturally my question was why do you choose the wrong sign? He said well then they have an important property that we call asymptotic freedom or something like that. I don't think he called it that but then there was an important property which nowadays would be called asymptotic freedom.

[83:40] Right. So do you know that you can use the gauge theory to get the same effect and you don't have to choose the wrong side of the couplings. You just choose the couplings as they are thought to be. But this theory has this property already. And he said, no, I didn't know that. How do you know? I said, well, I computed it.

[84:01] He said, if that's true, this is what you say, you should publish it very quickly, because if you don't, someone else will make that discovery, and this is important, it would explain strong interactions. And although I agreed with him, I had so many other things to do that I postponed writing down, because I had used different ways than other people who do these calculations, so I would have to explain everything before I could give the answer. What I should have done, I learned, I should have written just a

[84:28] a physics letter paper, a very short paper saying this is my result and this is this probably is called asymptotic freedom but now what happened was I waited much too long and that came across Wilczek and Pollitzer who independently had arrived at the same result that is asymptotically free. So well then Symantec was the first to say yes but if you announce something in a conference that counts as far as priority goes

[84:58] But, well, I hadn't written it down properly and he thought he should talk about it because maybe I probably made a sign error somewhere. So I couldn't believe that gauge theories are so much different from scalar theories that you could change the sign of the beta function, which was the essential thing that happened here.

[85:22] Now, before you go, professor, you have a program on how to become a good theoretical physicist. I'll place that URL on screen, a link to that website as well. Can you please talk about it for those who are listening who want to become researchers in physics, new students, maybe some existing researchers who want to improve their skills, follow the advice of a Nobel laureate? Yes. Well, indeed, I thought that I get many letters from people who

[85:50] who have a view of nature that isn't quite real, that doesn't agree with many of the things you know very well in science. So, let me try to give an answer to all of them, all of the more serious researchers, that they have to know about physics. And of course, all the standard things in physics, which you shouldn't skip, you shouldn't skip the understanding of Newton's laws or why planets move in elliptical orbits, you shouldn't skip

[86:18] The relations of the electric and magnetic fields by Maxwell, all those topics you have to learn first. You have to learn what thermodynamics is. And then I mentioned a sort of a dozen other topics in theoretical physics that you really have to understand. When you understand all these theories and you understand also what the limits are, like quantum mechanics, it's not believed to be exactly true, but true enough for practical purposes.

[86:47] and you have to understand that then you can try to see if you see any gap here that you can fill in with a personal calculation that should improve what we know now and that's difficult difficult part of it you shouldn't just well this discard discard the old series

[87:10] without first having an idea about what to replace it with and what would be better than the replaced series. And now I get letters, of course, from people who discard the old theory and replace it with something they think is better. But I immediately see that there aren't any equations that you can use. You can't use that to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron or you can't use that to calculate the thermal properties of particles near the black hole and all these

[87:37] All these kind of questions which you now do know how to calculate. So you first have to know the existing and verified part of physics, which is an enormous amount of work. More than 100, maybe 200 years of science now fits in one big textbook. But to read it all, it takes lots and lots of time. And I thought that you have to calculate, not just read it, but also do the calculations to see that it works.

[88:06] So it can't just be that one's new theory has to recapitulate all of the two hundred years of science of physics in particular, because even you're a champion of cellular automaton, someone could say, well, where is the magnetic moment of the electron to even five decimal places? You would say, well, that's not what this theory is about. I haven't gotten to that level. So it has to be more than just. Reproduce 200 years.

[88:30] Yes, it is of course the reason why I didn't write so many papers on cellular automata, because there are so many things I don't know. But where I disagree with Steve Wolfram, who wrote a very thick book about cellular automata, but the book contains not much information that I can use. I want the rule, if you have a cellular automaton of this and that sort,

[88:53] Now find which elementary particles will occur in nature because of the similar automaton behavior. And I think that is possible in principle. And those particles might look like standard model particles, but what the exact rules are, how to do this calculation is still way beyond me because it's very, very difficult to see how these things hang together.

[89:16] Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Hi there.

[89:39] Kurt here. If you'd like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my sub stack at kurtjymungle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time

[89:57] You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org. You can also just search my name and the word sub stack on Google. Since I started that sub stack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, sub stack for those who are unfamiliar is like a newsletter, one that's beautifully formatted. There's zero spam.

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[90:54] While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. And it's the perfect way to support me directly. KurtJaymungle.org or search KurtJaymungle substack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students. That's fantastic.

[91:24] If you're a professor or a lecturer or what have you and there's a particular standout episode that students can benefit from, or your friends, please do share. And of course, a huge thank you to our advertising sponsor, The Economist. Visit economist.com slash totoe to get a massive discount on their annual subscription. I subscribe to The Economist and you'll love it as well.

[91:49] Toe is actually the only podcast that they currently partner with. So it's a huge honor for me. And for you, you're getting an exclusive discount. That's economist.com slash toe. And finally, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it.

[92:13] I know my last name is complicated, so maybe you don't want to type in Jymungle, but you can type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gain from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comment that toe listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on one of those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, whatever podcast catcher you use. I'm there with you. Thank you for listening.

[92:39] Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?

[92:52] Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.

▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)

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      "text": " Instead, there are these discrete cellular automata updating in quantized steps. Today, we discuss why he thinks standard physics has it backward, particles don't exist in multiple states, cats aren't simultaneously dead and alive, the universe never plays dice. I'm Kurt Jaimungal, and in this conversation, we tackle super determinism, why seemingly absurd theories get more support than ostensibly realistic ones,"
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      "text": " And how recognizing space-time quantum clones solves the problems of black holes. Professor, when we were speaking off air, you mentioned to me that the crazier the proposal, the easier it is to get accepted. What did you mean by that?"
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      "text": " Well, it happens very often, rather surprisingly, if you come with a very simple theory or idea, then people have all sorts of complaints and objections. When you come to something which clearly cannot be corrected entirely and sounds like a really long distance approach, then that gets much more support in general. For example, I first encountered that when I"
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      "text": " was in heavy discussions with my advisor Veltman about renormalization and we agreed on one very important problem to be handled which was can it all be done consistently? The equations that you have not contradicting each other and I searched very hard and I had the idea of adding a fifth dimension to space and time and it worked but then it only worked for one-loop diagrams and then it went wrong"
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      "text": " So eventually I said well maybe if I take 3.99 dimensions or 4.01 then everything is formally finite and calculable and there are no contradictions. So all I have to do is take a limit and then go and the number of spacetime dimensions goes to 4."
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      "text": " But then I thought, how am I going to explain that to Feldman, because he's very critical. So now I said, well, I have this idea about changing the number of dimensions of spacetime, not by an integer, but by a small fractional number. And much to my surprise, he got immediately enthusiastic right away. And that was for other colleagues as well. They immediately accepted such a wild idea, which I thought was rather crazy."
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      "text": " Whereas in contrast, if you talk about quantum mechanics, and you suggest maybe quantum mechanics is just a deterministic theory in disguise, in disguise because there's so much going on in this universe, you can't really check whether it's deterministic or not. But I thought this was a very natural sort of zero attitude you would have towards quantum mechanics. But again, then people come up with lots of objections."
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      "text": " But when you propose to someone that there are two or many universes at the same time, some more real than the other, but they're all real, different realities, I find that total nonsense. I can't understand how that works. But very rarely you hear objections against that. You hear only alternatives which are equally crazy. But the idea that the world is just completely deterministic, simple-minded, just like grains of sand,"
    },
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      "text": " So why do you think that is? Do you think it's because our validation criteria is off or do you think it's because the more fantastic idea, the more it appeals to people? Or is it the more fantastic idea, the more difficult it is to find an error with it?"
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      "text": " Yes I think it is that with more fantastic ideas you can make noise, you can shout that we now have a fantastically crazy idea and it works or maybe it works to some point but it seems to work and then you are a hero whereas if you propose something very basic, something very mundane, something very ordinary then they say yeah yeah we had that and we don't believe that it's something more complicated."
    },
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      "text": " Now, you've also expressed some frustration with quantum physicists in terms of blind spots. You just alluded to it. So regarding interpretations of quantum mechanics, let's flesh that out some more, please. Yes. Well, the"
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      "text": " The important point is that quantum mechanics only gives statistical answers to any questions as to what will happen when you make such an experiment. And you directly get the statistical answer which is part of the world of possible answers that sounds reasonable. And so quantum mechanics gives you the correct probabilistic predictions. But the real world isn't probabilistic, it's only probabilistic"
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      "text": " If you don't have all information to be sure that this book is there and that book is there, no, if you just open the cupboard you find all books falling on the floor and you can't predict how they will fall on the floor except they make kind of predictions just as in quantum mechanics where you say no, no, we don't know where this book is going, you don't know where that book is going, but we just know"
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      "start_time": 438.148,
      "text": " the probability that something happens, and this you can calculate, and this you can check against experiment. Do we get right deviations from the probabilities predicted by quantum mechanics? So, in that sense, the theory is right, but the theory gives completely wrong predictions as to say, where exactly will everything come? Quantum mechanics can only give statistical predictions, and I think"
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      "index": 20,
      "start_time": 467.142,
      "text": " Those predictions are totally wrong, but they are closer to the truth than anything else you can predict. And they're closer to the truth because in many cases you cannot make any better predictions. Think of an insurance company. The insurance company is not interested in exactly where and when you made your accident. The insurance company will just want to know how many cars are there, how many people are driving these cars."
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      "end_time": 515.64,
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      "text": " How many have alcohol in their blood? How many have done this? How many have done that? So they want a statistical answer. They don't want the explicit answers. So I think in the world of science also quantum mechanics will give you the statistical answers and not the true answers. But to me that means that the theory is incorrect. We should basically have a theory which if you"
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      "text": " Start with a situation where every single particle, every single atom, every single photon is exactly localized the way that it should be, or having the probabilities that it should, having the properties that it should have without any doubt, any uncertainty. Then the CA should predict explicitly where every single particle is going."
    },
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      "end_time": 564.48,
      "index": 23,
      "start_time": 541.647,
      "text": " Now, we don't have such a theory and quantum mechanics is not such a theory, but eventually what I want is to have a theory that gives this kind of predictions. If you knew all the initial data with infinite accuracy, with mathematical precision, then the theory gives you an explicit result that every single particle will only collide in one particular way and all the others are simply not happening."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 594.65,
      "index": 24,
      "start_time": 564.77,
      "text": " So that's the theory I want for quantum mechanics even though I know very well that nobody will ever be able to use that property in practice. In practice we don't know the initial states so accurately that we don't know how particles will collide so any answer will be as good as any other. So but then quantum mechanics is a perfect ingenious theory that gives you exactly the right probabilities which is what we want in practice anyway. So for practical use it's not so"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 622.415,
      "index": 25,
      "start_time": 595.333,
      "text": " meaningful to search for a theory that predicts everything with infinite prediction. But for me, searching for how such a theory would look like will give me some idea about the ultimate truth, a theory that, like quantum mechanics, gives you very precise probabilities. But if you knew the initial state, it would be infinitely precise. Such a theory has my strong preference."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 639.172,
      "index": 26,
      "start_time": 622.944,
      "text": " even if we don't even know how to start building such a theory. And that's in the peculiar situation right now that even if you wanted a deterministic theory, it is very hard to design it just from a sketch. We don't know enough."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 667.329,
      "index": 27,
      "start_time": 640.265,
      "text": " So when you say quantum theory is quote unquote totally wrong, I'm sure firstly, some people may be thinking hidden variables. Is that what this professor is arguing for? Hidden variables have been disproved. We can get to your cellular automata approach shortly. But why would you say that it's totally wrong? Because the counter argument is that it's considerably precise in its predictions and it's been verified to more digits than anything else in any other field of our knowledge."
    },
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      "end_time": 695.998,
      "index": 28,
      "start_time": 668.541,
      "text": " What is wrong is that the theory doesn't ever talk about generally existing situations, which I have a probability one of happening and probability zero of not happening or any other situation is probability zero. Think of two particles in a beam like at CERN. The two particles will hit each other and suppose we knew exactly how these two particles, how many of them will hit and how they will hit and so on."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 726.425,
      "index": 29,
      "start_time": 696.493,
      "text": " Then still, quantum mechanics gives you a probabilistic outcome. Even though the initial state were precisely defined, then still the theory gives you a statistical answer. And that, according to my intuition, cannot be right. Okay, so the probability distribution is not such that it's zero everywhere except at one place and gives 100? Yes, yes. I see."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 751.834,
      "index": 30,
      "start_time": 726.783,
      "text": " You said you wanted to ask a question about hidden variables, but what I'm talking about really is hidden variable theory, or rather the philosophy of the hidden variable theory is exactly followed. Except when people try to make computations with hidden variables, they don't follow its own philosophy and that's why they get contradictions which are worse than the contradictions in quantum mechanics. So they say no, that cannot be right."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 781.527,
      "index": 31,
      "start_time": 753.677,
      "text": " Tell me about this. What's the distinction between hidden variables as people conceptualize it and then the so-called philosophy of hidden variables? What is the philosophy of hidden variables? Well, in principle, it agrees. That's why I call it a philosophy of the hidden variables. The hidden variable itself obeys this philosophical intuition that it should be giving infinitely perfect, infinitely precise predictions. The probabilistic outcome"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 810.828,
      "index": 32,
      "start_time": 781.988,
      "text": " our distributions that we measure in our experiments comes about because we don't know well enough how to do any calculations that will give you a more precise result. It's the same like when you in the weather forecast you predict there will be clouds there, there will be rain there, but we cannot possibly predict where every single rain drop will be falling, how exactly the clouds will be shaped and so on. Of course we cannot do that, that's much too hard, but it doesn't mean that the"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 837.585,
      "index": 33,
      "start_time": 811.237,
      "text": " The meteorologist who makes this prediction doesn't try to predict as accurately as he can what the shapes of the clouds will be and so on. But as you know, of course, they're not far from getting very precise theories about that. So there are, broadly speaking, two interpretations of the wave function. One is called psi-ontic."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 861.8,
      "index": 34,
      "start_time": 838.131,
      "text": " And then another is called Psi epistemic. And for people who have vaguely heard these terms, ontic refers to something existing in reality and then epistemic has to do with our knowledge of it. So Psi ontic, people who believe the wave function is real tend to be Everettians, for instance. And then Psi epistemics, I assume you would qualify as such."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 891.237,
      "index": 35,
      "start_time": 862.108,
      "text": " And then the counter argument would be, well, what about the PBR theorem? So there are loopholes. Can you speak about these loopholes, please? And also, I would love to know your view on many worlds. It's basically the same that many worlds is as untrue as the other theories of quantum mechanics, where you have several realities. But the many world series, the extreme logical"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 913.712,
      "index": 36,
      "start_time": 891.954,
      "text": " conclusion from the many worlds theory that every single outcome is possible with a certain quantum probability. I'm saying you would expect even a deterministic theory to give such predictions because you are not able to do every computation as accurately as you want."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 943.029,
      "index": 37,
      "start_time": 914.104,
      "text": " So even if you have a deterministic theory, then still you would only be able to make statistical predictions. So you have to take the complete world of all possible states. That's your in state, your initial state. The final state will also be a distribution of certain, of infinitely many possibilities. And your theory is better if these probability distributions look more similar to the reality."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 971.425,
      "index": 38,
      "start_time": 943.541,
      "text": " That's the kind of theory which one could call hidden variable theories and I agree that that's basically the main idea that there are variables that we cannot identify exactly today but which happen only with certainty, never with a distribution of superposition of possibilities but only single sharp states."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 999.753,
      "index": 39,
      "start_time": 973.2,
      "text": " Roger Penrose is also known for saying quantum theory is wrong. Note, I also spoke to Roger Penrose about this very topic. Link in the description. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. I say this very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. Einstein and Schrodinger were much more polite. They said it was incomplete. Incomplete means wrong. Well, you're telling it like it is. We've got to change it so it's wrong."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1026.374,
      "index": 40,
      "start_time": 1000.094,
      "text": " And I'm curious, given that you're both Nobel Prize winners who believe quantum theory is incomplete, which is how I would characterize it, just so you know. Have you ever had a conversation with Penrose about this? Yes, very often I disagree with him and there are basic issues. But his formulation is a bit vague as to what it exactly means. But he has many theories that I don't believe in. But"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1050.606,
      "index": 41,
      "start_time": 1027.176,
      "text": " My only belief is that the ultimate theory of nature, whatever it looks like, has only variables, like hidden variables, and everything that happens happens with certainty. This happens, that does not happen, but there's nothing in between. There's never a superposition between a dead cat and a live cat, for instance. That's the famous example where you bring quantum mechanics to the extreme. No, I would think,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1077.551,
      "index": 42,
      "start_time": 1050.998,
      "text": " We don't know what the theory will predict, whether the cat will die, whether the cat will survive. We don't know that. That's very, very hard. But in principle, the theory should predict whether the cat will be alive or not. And the cat will not be in a superposition. That's only because our understanding today of the true laws of nature is too uncertain and too imprecise to be able to do any better than saying that the cat will have"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1106.852,
      "index": 43,
      "start_time": 1077.773,
      "text": " So I know we spoke briefly off air, and I want to reference something. This is a quotation from you, I believe. I hope I wrote this down correctly. My claim is that if we ever hit the true equations, there will be no superposition any longer. Yes. So this is what you're referring to. That's what I'm saying. Yes."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1133.933,
      "index": 44,
      "start_time": 1107.193,
      "text": " Okay, please expand on that. So why would it be that if you found the true equations there would be no superposition? Well, I remember your first question was about why do people not believe the easy things and why do they have such more difficulty, less difficulty with the, let's say it again. In your first question, you"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1164.343,
      "index": 45,
      "start_time": 1135.35,
      "text": " I talked about how the more outlandish and zany the theory, the more it's accepted, at least it's cognitively easy for a physicist to not find objections with it. The thing that people now always put in doubt is, to me, the far most obvious situation. I think that grains of sand are particles just like planets and stars or rocks or atoms or molecules. They're all particles and they all obey equations."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1191.169,
      "index": 46,
      "start_time": 1164.599,
      "text": " Okay, the equation of the molecules and the atoms is a bit different, but basically it should be the same, that is to say there are variables which determine what it will do next. But an atom or molecule is much more complicated than what people think. It's not just that the molecule consists of so many atoms and then they are in a wave function and that's it. No, they are not in a wave function. There are things there which I don't know even whether they are atoms or molecules, but something else."
    },
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      "end_time": 1215.572,
      "index": 47,
      "start_time": 1191.903,
      "text": " and they only obey equations that lead to certain outcomes if you know the initial states with infinite certainty. That holds for rocks, for sand, for atoms and molecules and elementary particles and photons and neutrinos, you name it all, they are all only obeying deterministic laws. I would find this the most obvious"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1246.032,
      "index": 48,
      "start_time": 1216.357,
      "text": " Just a moment. Don't go anywhere."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1271.288,
      "index": 49,
      "start_time": 1246.391,
      "text": " I see you inching away. Don't be like the economy. Instead, read The Economist. I thought all The Economist was was something that CEOs read to stay up to date on world trends. And that's true, but that's not only true. What I found more than useful for myself, personally, is their coverage of math, physics, philosophy, and AI, especially how something is perceived by other countries and how it may impact markets."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1295.35,
      "index": 50,
      "start_time": 1271.288,
      "text": " For instance the economist had an interview with some of the people behind deep seek the week deep seek was launched no one else had that another example is the economist has this fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even scientific americans coverage in my opinion they also have the chart of everything like the chart version of this channel it's something which is a pleasure to scroll through and learn from."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1313.166,
      "index": 51,
      "start_time": 1295.35,
      "text": " Links to all of these will be in the description of course. Now the economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means that you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments. I am personally interested in the more scientific ones like this one on extending life via mitochondrial transplants which creates actually a new field of medicine."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1337.466,
      "index": 52,
      "start_time": 1313.166,
      "text": " Something that would make Michael Levin proud. The Economist also covers culture, finance and economics, business, international affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA. Whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting landscape of global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage and it goes far beyond just headlines."
    },
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      "text": " Look, if you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. I subscribe to them and it's an investment into my, into your intellectual growth. It's one that you won't regret. As a listener of this podcast, you'll get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1382.193,
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    {
      "end_time": 1410.418,
      "index": 55,
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      "text": " We also spoke off air about quantum mechanics as a language and I'm not sure what that meant so maybe that's related to your newest approach. You use the word epistemic. You use the word epistemic which is that it describes things and the wave function is epistemic."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1440.145,
      "index": 56,
      "start_time": 1410.759,
      "text": " That's exactly what it is, I believe. It's because we haven't got anything better than that wave function. So let's assume that wave function is a way to describe the probability distributions that will come out of your experiment. The real reason why you get probabilistic distributions will be that we don't understand and we don't have the initial state with infinite position. Which is what you would need to get a precise non-probabilistic answer, but just a certain answer as to what is happening."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1470.486,
      "index": 57,
      "start_time": 1441.323,
      "text": " Okay, so why don't we get to your cellular automaton approach? And why don't you walk us through how it was initially and then what it's evolved to now? It didn't change very much. The original idea was that the world, although it looks like a probabilistic world, where notions as temperature and entropy are very well defined, better defined than many of the deterministic notions of particles and molecules,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1500.794,
      "index": 58,
      "start_time": 1471.203,
      "text": " And so the cellular automaton is a collection of cellular automata which are all influencing each other but basically they are data which only influence each other when they are nearest neighbors. So the position of a thing is very important because it can only affect its neighbors. It cannot affect directly things that are further away than a few fundamental distances, steps in fundamental distances. So"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1529.053,
      "index": 59,
      "start_time": 1501.135,
      "text": " is typically what you get in a pinball machine, although the pinball machine is designed to generate random numbers, but if you could predict with infinite precision what is happening to these balls in the machine, then they all go in a predictable orbit, they go down in the machine. And the rest depends on details that are too difficult for us now to calculate, that's what the machine is made for. But in principle, everything should be predictable."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1547.875,
      "index": 60,
      "start_time": 1529.804,
      "text": " and in the cellular automaton you build more basically on that idea but now you say let's take the rules about how one object affects its neighbor let's suppose those rules are completely fixed by very simple"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1576.596,
      "index": 61,
      "start_time": 1548.558,
      "text": " So I could show on screen right now, just for the viewers, John Conway's Game of Life as an example. That's a nice example, except it's not reversible in time. Whereas the real world as you see it, seems to be"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1601.135,
      "index": 62,
      "start_time": 1577.159,
      "text": " I would emphasize seems to be reversible in time. That is to say, if you have something happening, the same event happening backwards in time, if you make a movie of me talking but you show a movie backwards in time, then the same equations are obeyed. Well, actually the situation is a little bit more difficult. You have to replace particles by antiparticles and some"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1630.35,
      "index": 63,
      "start_time": 1601.8,
      "text": " and mirror particles as well. But that's the detail. The important point of the automaton, and that is probably important if you want to impose quantum mechanics. If you want to say that this thing actually can be turned into quantum mechanics. And probably what you want is to have a time-reversible set of laws. The set of laws can be extremely simple because you only need to say what happens when a particle sees another one at his neighbour."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1655.282,
      "index": 64,
      "start_time": 1631.118,
      "text": " And if you know where all the particles are situated, you're going to have waves that go through this situation. You can make it look as complicated as the real world. And that is very important. I think the real world to me does not look any more complicated than this, except that for the real world, I don't know the equations and I'm not going to find out anymore in my lifetime."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1678.507,
      "index": 65,
      "start_time": 1655.623,
      "text": " So we don't know the equations but maybe one day physicists will guess the equations and from that guess they'll discover that not only the equations seem to agree more or less with what they know experimentally but it can also predict what kind of particles this will produce. Those particles are"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1703.302,
      "index": 66,
      "start_time": 1679.292,
      "text": " Phenomena that you can also describe in this automata. Particles are quanta of energy. That's the most precise definition. Not infinite precise, but very precise definition of a particle is that it is a quantum of energy. And energy is something you can define classically, even though it's not quite deterministic. And that's an important complication in the whole theory."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1730.52,
      "index": 67,
      "start_time": 1703.592,
      "text": " But basically we have time, we have energy, we have momentum, we have all the properties of the particles and they all interact in a completely fixed, described way. If these fixed laws only act on integers and on fixed time steps, then everything can be put in a computer because a computer also works with infinite"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1758.575,
      "index": 68,
      "start_time": 1732.858,
      "text": " Ford BlueCruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in BlueCruise enabled vehicles like the F-150, Explorer and Mustang Mach-E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com slash BlueCruise for more details."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1790.009,
      "index": 69,
      "start_time": 1761.971,
      "text": " only discrete numbers and discrete time steps, but then the computer can be extremely accurate as well. Sometimes it may make a mistake because they have fluctuations, but not very often. So most computers then agree very precisely as a result what the outcome of an experiment will be. There's a good reason to suspect that such a theory could also predict that actually before we understand how things happen in practice,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1807.056,
      "index": 70,
      "start_time": 1790.503,
      "text": " What we will see is that there are things that look very much like the particles that particle physicists have been talking about for years now, so-called standard model relevant to particles. The standard model is a quantum model, but as a quantum model it"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1829.343,
      "index": 71,
      "start_time": 1807.688,
      "text": " It gives you very precise statistical predictions which can be measured and checked with experiment and you find that the standard model today is the best possible way we can describe these particles. So the next step would be if you have a discrete model like the cellular automata that they should reproduce the same world of standard model particles."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1858.08,
      "index": 72,
      "start_time": 1829.991,
      "text": " and now the fact that you can't accept any non-integent numbers in the standard model automaton also means that when these standard models particles interact, they collide and they go away in different directions, then this whole phenomenon of the collision will be described by integer numbers only. And that's very interesting from the point of view of standard model physicists, because that sort of standard model does not have, it also has"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1884.087,
      "index": 73,
      "start_time": 1858.524,
      "text": " Numbers of pi floating around are numbers which are not very precisely known, but certainly they can fill a complete continuum of constants of nature in the standard model. This continuum should be broken up, and that's what my theory would predict. The likely models, the models that work in practice, will have only integers even in their coupling strengths."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1912.637,
      "index": 74,
      "start_time": 1884.326,
      "text": " And that is not as we understand the particles now, but something one might expect in the distant future to be discovered, that yes, you can also compute how all the particles interact with integers. So is discreteness important? Is it extremely important? So the reason is that you could have the universe following rules that go stepwise. Well, I guess when I say stepwise,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1930.043,
      "index": 75,
      "start_time": 1912.995,
      "text": " That is discrete, but what I was going to say is there could still be some dependence on real numbers, which are continuous. So, for instance, one of the updating rules could rely on pi, all of the digits of pi. So is the discreteness through and through important?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1958.336,
      "index": 76,
      "start_time": 1930.981,
      "text": " I think yes, because if you don't have discreteness, but a continuum of possibilities, the continuous numbers are the real numbers. But the real numbers, every single real number is only specified if you have specified infinite number decimal places. That's very hard to realize in a finite model like the cellular automaton. So I don't believe in the existence of real numbers in physics. Well, that's very strange because everything in physics today"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 1986.51,
      "index": 77,
      "start_time": 1958.66,
      "text": " seems to be controlled by real numbers. So why am I saying that? I'm saying that this may hold only in this idealized model of theory, which hasn't been discovered at all now, which you don't know of any of the details how they work. But if we find the details, my prediction would be those details will only depend on integers, not even rationals, because a rational number can also have infinitely many values."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2014.019,
      "index": 78,
      "start_time": 1986.886,
      "text": " No, only integers have finite values and the integers shouldn't be too big also. They should be between 1 and 2 perhaps or between 1 and 137 or something like that. But finite numbers and only then can your model be deterministic without ever needing to make statistical approximations. Whereas with real numbers you never know for sure whether the real numbers will hit each other or not when two particles collide with different"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2036.869,
      "index": 79,
      "start_time": 2014.565,
      "text": " Impact parameter which is controlled by a real number. If those real numbers are different, then at one situation the particles will collide, in the other case they will not collide. But it will be very hard to make a theory where all this will come out with certainty only. And that's the basic demand I have for the future theory is, it will only be based on certainties."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2063.387,
      "index": 80,
      "start_time": 2037.278,
      "text": " Well, we don't understand anything today, so today's science is without certainties. Fine, so we have work to do as a scientist, we have to work to do to find this theory which only contains certainties and therefore it may only contain integer numbers. Even the time steps, but time is one possible exception that things might go like when you have embroidery if you"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2091.527,
      "index": 81,
      "start_time": 2063.831,
      "text": " have a needle and a thread and the needle goes to and fro, then the needle will follow a continuous orbit and then, depending on that continuous orbit, the knots that you create are discrete tiles and only indicated with integer numbers. In that way, time is formally real, but this real number won't play a role in the predictions that you make. Only the position of the particle is a function of time."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2121.169,
      "index": 82,
      "start_time": 2092.108,
      "text": " So there are two key people that come to mind that have worked on super determinism, a word which I don't think we've said yet, but we're going to get to. And you're a large proponent of super determinism. The other two are Tim Palmer and Sabine Haassenfelder. Tim Palmer has"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2150.213,
      "index": 83,
      "start_time": 2121.425,
      "text": " rational quantum mechanics so i don't know if you've looked into that but if you have i would like to know what your thoughts are well i think it's a typical example of someone going very far in my direction yes but not as far as i am because i'm saying that the numbers should never be rational because then you have still an infinite number of possibilities there should be numbers determined by rules"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2171.749,
      "index": 84,
      "start_time": 2150.503,
      "text": " Of course a rational number is a numerator divided by a denominator. So yes, those are integers. So if the rational numbers he talks about are really numerators and denominators, but themselves are only carrying integer numbers, even integer numbers which are restricted, then beautiful inside. But so Palmer is not precisely"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2195.213,
      "index": 85,
      "start_time": 2172.688,
      "text": " Now, with this discreteness, do you have to have a preferred foliation in order to describe this discreteness in your model, or is the discreteness something else that isn't exactly space-time discreteness?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2222.21,
      "index": 86,
      "start_time": 2196.22,
      "text": " That's the hard part of the question. We have Einstein's equations. We have curvature of space and time. So that will usually, any theory that uses that will have to have such sheets. And how to make those discretized is very difficult. But there is a theory such as loop quantum gravity that tries to do something of that sort."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2251.067,
      "index": 87,
      "start_time": 2222.705,
      "text": " So they have my sympathy, but again, they're not going far enough to my taste in determinism. Steven Wolfram is another person who doesn't go into super determinism, but also has cellular automata. So you're a unique blend. I want to get to how lonely it feels at another question, but it would be great to talk about the early 2000 Steven, because now the Steven is hypergraph Steven. But earlier it was cellular automata Steven."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2280.111,
      "index": 88,
      "start_time": 2251.578,
      "text": " What is the difference between your approach and his? And did his influence yours or did yours influence his? Or was it independent? Maybe not quite independent. I think he was much earlier in looking at cellular automata than I am. So if there's any, what is it? Causal priority? Priority, then it belongs to him because he worked very much earlier with cellular automata."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2310.009,
      "index": 89,
      "start_time": 2280.538,
      "text": " I remember the game of life as an example, but that has absorption and that's not really as deterministic as I wanted. But yes, I think that Palmer's ideas and mine are very close, but they're just not quite exactly the same. So again, when we were speaking off air,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2339.241,
      "index": 90,
      "start_time": 2310.947,
      "text": " We talked about how many people send you their theory of everything or just their theories on physics. And most of it, it's not terribly useful to you. There was a diamond in the rough though, from Edward Fredkin, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Here's one of the exceptions to the rule. And the rule is basically that these people who come with their own crazy idea, their ideas are too crazy. And they're"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2359.241,
      "index": 91,
      "start_time": 2340.111,
      "text": " They show a lack of understanding of what already scientists know about the world. What scientists know is that the standard model of the particles works extremely well. That cannot be an accident, so we want to use that. We don't want to throw away the standard model before we have anything better."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2388.183,
      "index": 92,
      "start_time": 2359.667,
      "text": " Eventually, the model is not infinitely good. It has some weak spots. We all know that. Scientists are aware of this. They try to repair the weak spots, but they don't try to overthrow the standard model entirely, because there's so much good and sound science that went into it. So the idea is, what is the mathematics that you need to compare"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2417.91,
      "index": 93,
      "start_time": 2388.763,
      "text": " You sell an automaton with a standard model or similar models. Whereas the boundary, is there any boundary? I don't believe there is one, but it looks like it. And of course then you get the question that space and time are curved according to Einstein. That again also is something we know with practical certainty because there have been many observations that have been made that confirm Einstein's theory. So that is not the point to start"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2448.097,
      "index": 94,
      "start_time": 2418.473,
      "text": " So those things you want to keep, you want to keep general relativity, you want to keep the standard model. The first thing to drop would be the non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. But then we have to make many more steps to see how the existing understanding of the world as you know it, how this becomes completely folded into a useful theory."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2475.265,
      "index": 95,
      "start_time": 2450.947,
      "text": " Professor, something I don't understand is if this approach, your cellular automata approach, depends so sensitively on initial conditions such that any stochasticity that we perceive can always be said to be just ignorance, then given the initial conditions aren't accessible to us in anything that resembles the precision I imagine you'd require, how could you possibly falsify your theory?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2499.701,
      "index": 96,
      "start_time": 2477.756,
      "text": " I think that's going to be very hard, certainly for the time being, but as long as the theory isn't completely understood, like we don't know exactly the automaton equations that we want to obey, so as long as that's the case, the field theory has not been even remotely"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2528.268,
      "index": 97,
      "start_time": 2500.009,
      "text": " proven to be correct only if the theory would start to make predictions about standard model interactions for instance the masses of the neutrinos that you don't know very well today and the mass ratio relation between other particles that we can measure but not calculate are not in terms of features of the theory that you completely understand as long as that's the case you can't"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2556.681,
      "index": 98,
      "start_time": 2528.712,
      "text": " I hope however that maybe with the use of artificial intelligence there is more intelligence than the average human being, much more than maybe machines will find the way to uncover such a subtle automaton. Maybe the machine will know"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2587.176,
      "index": 99,
      "start_time": 2557.312,
      "text": " how to the quantum field theory of many many particles and why they can be effectively the way a cellular automaton exhibits itself. Because I see lots of relations between a quantum theory of really quantum theory of quantum particles on the one hand and a cellular automaton on the other. So I see that relation and that's where I differ from Wolfram. Wolfram didn't really ask the question how come"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2614.684,
      "index": 100,
      "start_time": 2587.602,
      "text": " that our world looks like some cellular automaton in disguise and it tries many examples but I'm sure that by trying just a model of this sort you won't get to the truth. The truth is too complicated. So I believe that we have to combine the work from experimental scientists to measure all the properties of the standard model as accurately as they can and then theoreticians ask why are these"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2645.213,
      "index": 101,
      "start_time": 2615.401,
      "text": " These different parameters that characterize the theory, why they relate with these particular ratios, where do these numbers come from, then maybe one day someone will find, oh, but this number I can recognize from the cellular automaton. It's that number. So a famous number of that sort is to find such a constant in electromagnetism. The ratio between the electric charge and smaller fundamental constants"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2674.411,
      "index": 102,
      "start_time": 2645.811,
      "text": " If you square that, then you get 1 over 137. But that number has many more decimal places behind the zero and the comma. That's a famous number that nobody can compute, but it exists, it can be measured very accurately, but we don't know how to compute that number. And the cellular automaton, if it's worth that name, should be able to compute where that number comes from and what it is."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2700.845,
      "index": 103,
      "start_time": 2675.759,
      "text": " Okay, this sounds like a great time to talk about what is super determinism and how is it contrasted with regular determinism. Well, it's not determinism as bitten by a radioactive spider. So what is determinism and how does that contrast with super determinism? I think different people have different interpretations as to what super determinism should mean."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2727.654,
      "index": 104,
      "start_time": 2701.357,
      "text": " and the problem is it's something that may be beyond super determinism but you can think of that in two ways. I think that the laws of nature are conspiring with each other such that that we are made to believe that quantum mechanics is real whereas reality is just a statistical phenomenon but it can also just mean that"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2747.568,
      "index": 105,
      "start_time": 2728.046,
      "text": " Determinism occurs at all levels in principle, so not only at the level of atoms and molecules but also bigger things like larger biological molecules or chemistry or even small particles and then eventually large particles, stars, universes, they all should be"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2771.459,
      "index": 106,
      "start_time": 2748.08,
      "text": " I go to the extreme, I think in principle we have completely deterministic equations. In practice we do not have the illusion that we will ever be able, even the AI people will not be able to calculate how things will evolve exactly. That will be far too complicated ever to achieve."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2795.879,
      "index": 107,
      "start_time": 2772.193,
      "text": " But we can then believe that the world has that determinism built in those laws as well, even if we can't ever derive the laws with precision. So if a super determinism means that, then I'm totally behind it, that I cannot expect anything else, that the entire world is controlled by equations that only say yes or no."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2818.353,
      "index": 108,
      "start_time": 2796.408,
      "text": " And whenever it answers a question, it never says maybe, it never gives you a probability distribution with probabilities different from zero or one. And if that is a super determinism means that I'm totally in favor of it. Sometimes people believe that super determinism means that, okay, the world is deterministic, but the answer is God's."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2843.029,
      "index": 109,
      "start_time": 2818.78,
      "text": " Pulling some switches to make things happen the way you are caught into thinking that quantum mechanics is the true theory or something of that sort. Some mysterious intervention of a divine ghost of something that makes things happen that otherwise would not be understandable. If that is not super determinism means then that's not what I believe at all."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2862.892,
      "index": 110,
      "start_time": 2843.643,
      "text": " So you're much more in line with Einstein who believed God doesn't play dice. I think Einstein would agree with me here. I would agree with Einstein. He was the first."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2885.145,
      "index": 111,
      "start_time": 2864.104,
      "text": " Okay, so super determinism is nothing over and above determinism. It's actually just determinism through and through. So most people, they think, well, Newton's laws are deterministic. There's some wiggle room there with Norton's dome. Super determinism is determinism all the way. Yes. But how complicated this thing is that you're looking at in principle, its laws are deterministic."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2910.811,
      "index": 112,
      "start_time": 2885.452,
      "text": " The subtlety here is that there's Bell's theorem, which seems to exclude determinism and one of the loopholes or one of the assumptions is statistical independence. So super determinism is usually spoken about as taking statistical dependence. So can you please explain what statistical independence is, why it's relevant to Bell's theorem and then where you land on it? Well,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2940.128,
      "index": 113,
      "start_time": 2911.493,
      "text": " I think Bell, with all respect, he was a very nice person and modest and he had just his ideas and he tried to prove, to understand how determinism works and then he found that in his theories the opposite is true, so that determinism didn't work for his theories. But I think he made a very elementary error, I would say, mistake. And that's to say that things that happened in the past have nothing to do with what happened at the present."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2967.108,
      "index": 114,
      "start_time": 2940.674,
      "text": " So Bob and Alice, his two observers in his experiment, the Duncan experiment, but still it's an experiment. Bob and Alice, they decide the last split second what to measure, whether it's a spin up inside his action or down or whatever. Or you could talk about photons, you could talk about spinors anyway. But"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 2995.23,
      "index": 115,
      "start_time": 2967.91,
      "text": " Bell assumed that the decisions made by Bob and Alice to measure something is independent of what happened in the past. And my reaction was, well, I first didn't really see clearly what he was trying to say. But then I realized what he was trying to say is something that cannot be true. That Bob and Alice cannot change their mind without something happening in the past that caused them to change their minds."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3022.159,
      "index": 116,
      "start_time": 2995.742,
      "text": " And if you do think so, then you have assumed that Bob and Alice do something without any explanation in the past. But that's precisely what my ideas about super determinism, or determinism, or super determinism, whatever, says, that not everything we do is also controlled by the same theory. So our decisions to measure this, to measure that, to measure that, also depends on what happened in the past. And"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3042.227,
      "index": 117,
      "start_time": 3022.517,
      "text": " If so, if Bell says the opposite and he needed that the opposite of that, he needed that the decision of Bob and I to measure something is independent of what the atoms did in the distant past. Just because he needed that, I say, well, that disproves his approach as being anything else."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3068.575,
      "index": 118,
      "start_time": 3042.637,
      "text": " Anything that would disprove the indeterminism or disprove the determinism of quantum mechanics. No, he made an assumption which you cannot hold. If you believe in determinism, you have to believe in super determinism all the way. And that's what he didn't do. Now, what about the critique that super determinism makes experimental science meaningless?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3095.077,
      "index": 119,
      "start_time": 3070.998,
      "text": " It makes experimental science harder, but not meaningless. Why not? I mean, we're doing science all the way and the interpretation of the quantum equations that we get is just something else. It means that the ultimate source of the quantum equations is not what people think they are. It's not that there are many realities."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3125.282,
      "index": 120,
      "start_time": 3095.64,
      "text": " And I think actually Bell also showed that because he made this assumption that these particles in the distant past can have any probabilistic distribution regardless as to what the decisions are that Bob and Alice make. No, as soon as Bob and Alice make a decision, you can point out in a completely deterministic theory, you can point exactly which atom in the past has made Bob and Alice to change their settings of their measurement."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3142.483,
      "index": 121,
      "start_time": 3127.449,
      "text": " So okay, allow me to be precise. I'll give some example. Let's suppose you have a thousand mice. Some of these mice are going to be predisposed to cancer and some are not. And we just don't know which"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3168.968,
      "index": 122,
      "start_time": 3142.671,
      "text": " One of these mice are predisposed, so we just are going to randomly divide them. And how do we randomly divide them? Well, we pick the two millionth digit of pie and we say if that digit is odd, then this mouse here, this mouse right up front will go to the left in one group. And then if the digit is even, then the mouse will go to the right and we just keep sorting based on, OK, now the three millionth digit of pie, now the four millionth and so on."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3198.456,
      "index": 123,
      "start_time": 3169.753,
      "text": " So standard statistics would say that each group would have roughly the same percentage of cancer-prone mice. If we later see more cancer in one group that smokes, say we make these mice smoke, so we give them cigarettes or what have you, then we conclude that smoking causes cancer. If we deny statistical independence, it means that somehow these mice could have conspired, not the mice themselves, but somehow the universe conspired such that"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3227.5,
      "index": 124,
      "start_time": 3198.797,
      "text": " The smoking group just happened to get more cancer prone mice in it. And I remember that tobacco companies use this to say that this is one of the reasons why smoking doesn't necessarily cause cancer. So how does statistical independence not fall prey to these sorts of arguments? Because Alice and Bob could choose their measurement settings based on coins or quantum"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3255.811,
      "index": 125,
      "start_time": 3227.961,
      "text": " Well, I think what one may well expect from a deterministic theory is that the ratios of events are more or less the way you expect them. So when you try to understand how the deterministic theory works,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3286.169,
      "index": 126,
      "start_time": 3256.834,
      "text": " You will find it's far too complicated to calculate exactly what happens. So we can't talk about exactly what will happen when exactly you do your experiment. The millionth mouse goes in that direction, the one millionth first mouse goes in that direction. If that's what you do, then we know very well that we will never be able to compute within this position in such a deterministic world what will happen. So at some point one has to make an assumption"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3316.596,
      "index": 127,
      "start_time": 3286.63,
      "text": " And the assumptions must sound reasonable. The assumption will be that all these mice are controlled by the same biological rules as others. Some mice will be immune against or more immune against a disease that gives them cancer. Others will be more sensitive to cancer cells. But you can compute all these things from the model more easily than to compute literally what every single mouse will do, what will happen to it."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3342.551,
      "index": 128,
      "start_time": 3317.108,
      "text": " and the same holds for insurance companies. Insurance companies never worry about whether the atoms which were taking the place, whether the car accident would take place, that those atoms were in the wrong position, he won't blame the atoms. They say well they can be in any position, but there are so many of such initial states that we can use to"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3373.183,
      "index": 129,
      "start_time": 3343.541,
      "text": " to see that randomness does enter into our world, whether we like it or not. So even in a deterministic theory, you have randomness in practice. And so then that wipes away the mouse problem, because then you say, well, every mouse is controlled by random phenomena anyway. My deterministic theory of the deterministic world will give a prediction if it"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3402.5,
      "index": 130,
      "start_time": 3373.473,
      "text": " could be handled in the position but we can't and we never will be so we are so far away from that situation that we can make such measurements that the next best thing is to use the biological arguments to see that someone in the insurance company is cheating and so on and so forth even name all sorts of reasons for one mouse to die sooner than another mouse or a cat being survived or death"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3409.531,
      "index": 131,
      "start_time": 3403.046,
      "text": " that in practice you never need to worry that this is going to be contradicting the deterministic theory."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3439.428,
      "index": 132,
      "start_time": 3412.159,
      "text": " OK, so this is a great point for people who just happened to skip forward to this point in the conversation. Most of the groundwork has been laid. Why don't you just outline what is your view of quantum mechanics? What is going on? What is the cellular automata approach? Now, I know you've already talked about it, but I'm just saying let's recapitulate it. So what is standard quantum theory say? And then what does your approach say? Well, there was my ideas. I was going with any say."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3464.394,
      "index": 133,
      "start_time": 3439.821,
      "text": " is that there is a way to identify parameters. We call them hidden variables. You can call them anything you like. Let's call it hidden variable because that has been mostly debated in the past. There are variables, let's call them hidden variables, which can only take the value yes or no, but nothing in between. Everything is determined by certain laws."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3487.585,
      "index": 134,
      "start_time": 3464.872,
      "text": " In principle, it would be possible to compute what such a model does in this infinite position. In practice, of course, it's nearly never possible. Even if you have an experiment at CERN and two beams of particles hit each other, no matter how sharp you focus one beam on the other beam, you still get some possibility of"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3510.794,
      "index": 135,
      "start_time": 3488.046,
      "text": " of arbitrary fluctuations that you don't have under control sufficient to make that what happens after the collision is all possibilities. The particle can go in all directions with different probabilities by the way there might be correlations such that they give you a small peak in your observations such a peak might be the effect of a new particle these things also happen but"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3541.493,
      "index": 136,
      "start_time": 3511.852,
      "text": " But the theory will not work better than ordinary quantum mechanics in the best of all possible worlds. So the theory cannot be used to make better quantum mechanical calculations. But it can be used to understand what the phenomena are and why the phenomena are there. Why are there mindset that die more easily from smoking cigarettes and others not?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3566.732,
      "index": 137,
      "start_time": 3541.988,
      "text": " and so on. So those questions you have to answer not by being a scientist but by being a biologist or a doctor who is investigating with all precision as he can to see what are the outcomes of this experiment, what are the spreadings, what can happen and what can you do. That is not going to be any better with the deterministic theory."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3587.346,
      "index": 138,
      "start_time": 3567.295,
      "text": " But what will be done better is that you can understand where all these laws come from. In particular, the standard model of elementary particles is the first in line to be researched using statistical, using deterministic phenomena."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3616.51,
      "index": 139,
      "start_time": 3589.906,
      "text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been in Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit bigdealevent.com for more details."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3646.101,
      "index": 140,
      "start_time": 3618.166,
      "text": " So professor, since you have such interesting views on or differing views on quantum mechanics, do you have any differing views on quantum gravity? So for instance, whatever the mainline approaches are, do you disagree with them at some fundamental level? Is there something that restricts what the mainline approaches would be if cellular automata were true? No, I think it's basically in craft to"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3669.77,
      "index": 141,
      "start_time": 3646.903,
      "text": " to give a different role to gravity than to all the other interactions. So normally we have electromagnetism, the terms how particles collide, sometimes it is strong and weak forces, but gravity is one of these other forces. It happens to be a lot weaker than the others, but in principle, gravity should be controlled by exactly the same situation."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3699.087,
      "index": 142,
      "start_time": 3670.384,
      "text": " There are particles called gravitons, there are black holes, all these other things which can happen in gravitational theory. They are all controlled by deterministic laws, which will be very difficult in the case of gravity. It really is very difficult even to think of how deterministic laws could be working in this case. So yes, this is a difficult problem, but I don't see why it should be impossible. There's no no-go theorem that no, you can't do that."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3727.739,
      "index": 143,
      "start_time": 3699.394,
      "text": " I think you have to be very intelligent, very smart and very resourceful and perhaps help with very clever experiments to see how this works, how you can bridge the gap between the"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3755.947,
      "index": 144,
      "start_time": 3728.063,
      "text": " There's no doubt in my mind that you have to use the same techniques of quantum mechanics in both cases. So yes, that means quantum gravity as such works, classical gravity only works in the cases where the quantum effects are insignificant, you can't see them, but they are there and they are there because there are still statistical phenomena that have taken place every now and then."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3769.036,
      "index": 145,
      "start_time": 3757.278,
      "text": " Okay, so i interviewed claudia dirham of massive gravity interview place on screen and she had this advice to her students which is that sure there may be no go theorems."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3795.384,
      "index": 146,
      "start_time": 3769.514,
      "text": " You should take them seriously, but don't take them as a total no, because there are ways to evade them. And her massive graviton had a specific potential that removes or decouples the ghosts at all orders. Also, there's a Weinberg Witten theorem, which she evades because she has a massive graviton. Do you give similar advice to your students that if you're violating some sacred assumption, well,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3823.916,
      "index": 147,
      "start_time": 3795.879,
      "text": " Yes, you should be concerned about it, but don't be too concerned. You can find your way around it. I would certainly say don't be too concerned about it, quite the opposite. If your theory disagrees strongly with the existing opinion about the situation, maybe it's a good idea to start to study it, because then not so many people have studied the opposite possibility yet. But in reality, you have to realize that most likely"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3852.432,
      "index": 148,
      "start_time": 3824.309,
      "text": " The correct answers, as history has shown, most likely the correct answers are by combining different phenomena. Like in the case of Maxwell, it was combining electricity and magnetism as one theory. So that was a very famous example. But there are other examples where you can see where gravity and elementary particles meet each other. For instance, the gravitons. They will be difficult or impossible to observe."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3881.817,
      "index": 149,
      "start_time": 3852.858,
      "text": " But in theory, they are there and they are just like photons. In many respects, they look very much like photons. And you can possibly learn new things, particularly if you take one step backwards. And I also have a strong advice for students. If you don't understand something and you don't believe that what you read in the books makes sense, just make a step backwards."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3908.37,
      "index": 150,
      "start_time": 3882.398,
      "text": " Try to ask the question, why do people say these things in the first place? Can it be that they didn't listen to each other? If they listened to each other, they would realize that they both made some mistakes or some make bigger mistakes than others. We all make mistakes, so take that into account and don't let yourself get scared away from viewpoints which might be more useful"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3935.794,
      "index": 151,
      "start_time": 3909.019,
      "text": " by getting in a combination of different theories together in one theory. That is often a sign that you might be on a new track, which is important. But many students like to do like their masters like disbelieve everything quantum gravity doesn't exist or something like that. I don't know what such a theory looks like, but it doesn't look like the theory I would like to defend."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3966.63,
      "index": 152,
      "start_time": 3936.817,
      "text": " Do you find that many of the master's students are the ones with ideas that are trying to discard most of standard physics and reformulate everything? Or do you find that's mostly what characterizes your inbox compared to your master's students? No, I think that is what happens when you begin as a physics student. And that are the good students. They doubt on everything they learn. They say it could be different. Let's assume that what this teacher says is not true."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 3995.35,
      "index": 153,
      "start_time": 3967.432,
      "text": " Why did he say this? And then some do long calculations, some do short calculations, but usually when they did the calculations, they said, yes, actually this teacher wasn't so bad after all. He is right. And what I first thought didn't hold. So you have to understand, that's the way you have to understand nature. So try to take things that seem to be not related, yet giving different answers to different scenarios."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4016.015,
      "index": 154,
      "start_time": 3996.101,
      "text": " Let's try to see if we can find a common denominator, a theory that works for both of them. So that would be one certain, many certain alleys of that sort that you can still investigate. If I understood correctly from our conversation off air,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4046.578,
      "index": 155,
      "start_time": 4017.108,
      "text": " You suggested that some composite particles, sorry, that some of what we think of as elementary particles may be confined to composite particles, but I'm not sure if I misunderstood that. Well, the question is, again, in the other direction, what makes a particle elementary? And I was once also having a discussion of people trying to define elementary particles as opposed to composite particles."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4070.145,
      "index": 156,
      "start_time": 4047.295,
      "text": " My immediate answer was well a composite particle is composite if it makes sense if it's useful to consider it as such. It's elementary if you can't identify any composite ingredients of the particle anymore then it's an elementary particle such as the photon is basically elementary the graviton will be basically elementary particles but"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4098.063,
      "index": 157,
      "start_time": 4070.657,
      "text": " You cannot try to make such definitions with infinite precision. If you use infinite precision, you know that the photon every now and then, you look like an electron to electron, and then come back again. So, the things which first look easy at one step, they become more complicated after more steps. But still, physics is a science where there's no such certainty today."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4125.162,
      "index": 158,
      "start_time": 4099.053,
      "text": " There's no such certainty as I would like to see, but I want to work my way to theories which have more certainty built in than normally. And that I think is an interesting alley to investigate today. Can you make theories which are more certain than others? And I found a very simple theory of that sort. I call it the grandfather's clock, a pendulum clock."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4149.855,
      "index": 159,
      "start_time": 4125.452,
      "text": " So a pendulum has a pendulum which goes one per second. It makes a full twist here. And then it has some gears in them. And while the gears are rotating, the pendulum does this. And I'm saying, yes, this is a model that has periodic behavior and it has linear behavior in how the hands of the flocks move continuously."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4179.36,
      "index": 160,
      "start_time": 4150.35,
      "text": " Both obey the same quantum laws. So you have a single set of quantum equations for the entire pendulum clock. And the nice thing about the pendulum clock is that on one end it has an oscillator, but it's a quantum oscillator. Quantum oscillators are known for having discretized energy levels and it's typically a quantum situation. But nevertheless, the entire model has also classical behavior. The hands of the clock move classically."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4206.647,
      "index": 161,
      "start_time": 4179.821,
      "text": " So now you have a collision between deterministic theories and quantum theories in one object, the pendulum clock, which is why I like the name pendulum clock, although you don't have to put all the ornamentations on it. It's still a thing that combines quantum mechanics with deterministic behavior. My belief is that you can do that with quantum mechanics itself."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4235.64,
      "index": 162,
      "start_time": 4207.227,
      "text": " And there are many pendulum clocks more complicated than the one that you normally have in your room. And so this would be the beginning of a research into completely deterministic theories which look quantum mechanical at first sight. So, Professor, speaking of quantum mechanical, I want to use that word quantum because we talked about quantum clones before."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4266.152,
      "index": 163,
      "start_time": 4236.237,
      "text": " It's more recent work of yours. So there's work by Neil Turok and Lathan Boyle about black hole horizons acting as mirrors. And you also have a theory of mirrors at the horizon. So please talk about that and how yours is distinguished from their model. Yeah, I don't know if this works. Let me see. Oh, perfect. Great. This describes a black hole."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4294.002,
      "index": 164,
      "start_time": 4267.193,
      "text": " and the feature is the black hole is a regional space time which is accelerated and when it is accelerated it has horizons the dark blue lines are horizons the other arrows are particles going into the black hole and this is a particle coming out of a black hole and this is the way I think one should understand how black holes behave in practice but"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4323.285,
      "index": 165,
      "start_time": 4295.077,
      "text": " There's a mapping between the future horizon to the past and that preserves unitarity. So did that? No, it is not valid. The whole thing is, yes, you want to get not to disobey unitarity or determinism. So now when people draw a black hole, they say, yes, but there's a similar space at the other side. Let me quickly draw it. There's another."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4347.398,
      "index": 166,
      "start_time": 4324.394,
      "text": " There's another universe at the other side here. Great. And so when you have data in this whole system, you have data here and you have data there. However, this data there cannot be realistic, because if that were a genuine thing, and according to the equations, this space here looks exactly identical to that one."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4376.493,
      "index": 167,
      "start_time": 4347.671,
      "text": " so this looks like a clone of that but normally when you do physics it isn't a clone because you can throw them in a particle here without throwing in a particle here but you can also say well maybe if you throw in a particle here then automatically an anti-observer anti-physicist will also throw a particle in here so then I say this is exactly a clone of that that means you can leave away this green region altogether so I talk about the single"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4406.101,
      "index": 168,
      "start_time": 4377.022,
      "text": " black hole now and maybe that is enough to describe all the data that are there. The advantage of that is that when you do this calculation now when determinism takes place in this one universe then determinism takes place in the other one as well. In fact this whole model if this is just a clone of that the whole thing can be called deterministic. If this is a separate universe it's going to be very hard because these particles will disappear in two"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4432.534,
      "index": 169,
      "start_time": 4406.749,
      "text": " into the infinite future and these particles come from the past long ago. But it's very difficult to say that this particle that gets out depends on the particle that moves in and that's what you want in a good theory. So determinism is helped by identifying these two regions and the side effect of that is that by identifying the two regions you make that the entropy"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4462.398,
      "index": 170,
      "start_time": 4432.927,
      "text": " and other properties of the particles here is only half of what you thought it was. The entropy is much larger. Now, temperature is a function of entropy in this model. So if you multiply the number of universes or you decrease the number of universes by a factor two, you increase the temperature in both of them by a factor two. So this also predicts a factor two difference from the usual outcome that people got out of these calculations."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4482.722,
      "index": 171,
      "start_time": 4463.353,
      "text": " So the Hawking temperature in your model would be times two of what the ordinary calculation is. This makes it even distinguishable experimentally potentially if we can get close enough to a black hole and measure its temperature and so on. It will be very hard because in practice such black holes will be very far away if they exist at all in our universe because we cannot"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4511.323,
      "index": 172,
      "start_time": 4483.336,
      "text": " So what you're saying is that when a particle is incoming into a black hole, it's not that that particle then appears somehow in the past because that would create a time like a closed time like curve. It's more subtle than that."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4541.852,
      "index": 173,
      "start_time": 4512.415,
      "text": " both the in and the outgoing particle will go through a quantum regime. And right when they both go through this point, then the laws which are obviously correct here and obviously correct here are not obviously correct at this point. Something else is happening there and that saves us, that makes the theory useful again, because all these particles will, if you just let time do its work, these outgoing particles come out much later, they will come out from this point, and the in-going particles"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4569.189,
      "index": 174,
      "start_time": 4542.329,
      "text": " So paint the picture for the audience member who's wondering, okay, if I"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4593.08,
      "index": 175,
      "start_time": 4569.565,
      "text": " The thing is that the physics happening here"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4615.299,
      "index": 176,
      "start_time": 4594.65,
      "text": " on this one and on that universe is not really physical at all because the physics is just basically this half where you have ingoing particles going in here and outgoing particles going out here what they do in between has anything to do with it it's a boundary condition of this horizon this horizon is such that if you enter it here you'll"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4642.449,
      "index": 177,
      "start_time": 4615.913,
      "text": " Get out there. But there's something very important in that change. It's the position of this particle which turns into momentum of that particle. There's a very strange kind of mix-up between position and momentum. But just in accordance with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that's what you must have. And then the theory works extremely well, I believe. But you should not, you cannot even ask the question what happens when you go through it. No."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4671.459,
      "index": 178,
      "start_time": 4642.91,
      "text": " So then there's no information paradox? There's no information paradox. Except perhaps the black hole is not exactly what you think it is. That's usually the answer in physics, in many branches of physics. You're only getting a successful theory if you"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4702.09,
      "index": 179,
      "start_time": 4672.261,
      "text": " This doesn't completely eliminate singularities. You get conical singularities, no? Yes. So why is that an improvement? It isn't. At first sight, it means that there's something very basically going wrong."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4726.937,
      "index": 180,
      "start_time": 4702.705,
      "text": " at this point, because when you say that this is a clone of that, then it means that you actually have to fold out a piece of paper double. Can you lift up the paper? If you don't mind, just lift it up, just so that the audience can see it some more. Yeah, perfect."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4748.302,
      "index": 181,
      "start_time": 4727.585,
      "text": " So now I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh no, that's fine. You were talking about the singularity and you were talking about how you have to fold the paper. Yes, if you fold the paper you get like when you have a bag of french fries, then at this point where they're all collected,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4777.005,
      "index": 182,
      "start_time": 4748.524,
      "text": " There's a singularity. It's a very mild singularity. You can undo it by making space-time a little more inaccurate here, and then the singularity disappears. But in the limit that you have to our description now, this looks like a singularity. That's called the conical singularity. That singularity, however, is the one that already occurs in ordinary string theory. String theories have all the singularities as very mild singularities at such a point where two strings interact."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4805.111,
      "index": 183,
      "start_time": 4777.841,
      "text": " and yeah or actually it's the string itself the position of the string itself also is a singularity but those are usually much milder because the string coupling constant is much smaller so this is like a string between the very strong string coupling constant right right it's the euclidean string or is it the thing that string theorists talk about but it's very similar to the thing string theorists talk about"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4834.838,
      "index": 184,
      "start_time": 4806.732,
      "text": " Now this factor of two, by the way, does that factor survive if the back reaction is non-perturbative? Like fully non-perturbative? Or is it independent of that? It's independent of that. I think the description I have here is very much like a zero-order description if you throw away the higher order correction terms. There will be correction terms, but very small. So they don't take away the basic properties of the theory. I see."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4863.814,
      "index": 185,
      "start_time": 4835.981,
      "text": " Thank you so much, Professor. I know that you have to get going. Why don't we talk about what you're working on these days? What's new? What's going on in your life? Where are you headed research wise? It is a black hole problem because the model I have right now is not accurate enough. It's accurate, I believe, but some of the details are not very well understood. In particular, this conical singularity at the origin. I want to understand it better."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4884.019,
      "index": 186,
      "start_time": 4864.428,
      "text": " And I want to also understand how to confront it with the particles of the standard model to see how they interact with the black hole. I want that to be very precisely described by some perturbative theory. But when you write down perturbation expansion, you have to say, perturbation in what? What is a small parameter?"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4914.445,
      "index": 187,
      "start_time": 4884.548,
      "text": " and usually that is the small parameter is that the masses of the standard model particles are much much lighter than the masses of the black holes that you're looking at and that means that in all our situations you will be very precise in saying that the first order calculation is probably far more dominant than any of the others but I want to have this ready in the form of a textbook where I say this textbook has the same kind of introduction as any textbook in quantum field theory"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4939.497,
      "index": 188,
      "start_time": 4914.906,
      "text": " In the old days, quantum field theory was a very difficult subject, it needed to be explained in detail how it works. This is also a difficult subject, it has to be explained in detail how it works, but there will be no doubt that the description is correct. You can always doubt whether the entire theory is correct, and that's allowed, you can always ask nasty questions, and they will be asked nasty questions, but in principle I want to get it as clear as I can get the whole theory."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4970.896,
      "index": 189,
      "start_time": 4942.108,
      "text": " Did you have a talk in Marseille about asymptotic freedom? Yes, that's an interesting thing that happened that we were in Montaigne and I already knew Professor Kurt Simancic, a very nice person, a very good thinker. He was doing very smart mathematics, which was very difficult for people to understand. But"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 4999.923,
      "index": 190,
      "start_time": 4971.186,
      "text": " We happened to meet each other at that conference, it was a few years after. Here I learned lots of things from him at his Cargése school. But I was again in Marseille and there he was and when we came out of the plane we realized we had both been using the same airplane at the airport of Marseille. And there we asked each other what we were doing and he said"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5019.787,
      "index": 191,
      "start_time": 5000.333,
      "text": " working on theories that have the wrong sign of the coupling constant. Naturally my question was why do you choose the wrong sign? He said well then they have an important property that we call asymptotic freedom or something like that. I don't think he called it that but then there was an important property which nowadays would be called asymptotic freedom."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5040.947,
      "index": 192,
      "start_time": 5020.401,
      "text": " Right. So do you know that you can use the gauge theory to get the same effect and you don't have to choose the wrong side of the couplings. You just choose the couplings as they are thought to be. But this theory has this property already. And he said, no, I didn't know that. How do you know? I said, well, I computed it."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5068.131,
      "index": 193,
      "start_time": 5041.578,
      "text": " He said, if that's true, this is what you say, you should publish it very quickly, because if you don't, someone else will make that discovery, and this is important, it would explain strong interactions. And although I agreed with him, I had so many other things to do that I postponed writing down, because I had used different ways than other people who do these calculations, so I would have to explain everything before I could give the answer. What I should have done, I learned, I should have written just a"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5098.131,
      "index": 194,
      "start_time": 5068.558,
      "text": " a physics letter paper, a very short paper saying this is my result and this is this probably is called asymptotic freedom but now what happened was I waited much too long and that came across Wilczek and Pollitzer who independently had arrived at the same result that is asymptotically free. So well then Symantec was the first to say yes but if you announce something in a conference that counts as far as priority goes"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5119.923,
      "index": 195,
      "start_time": 5098.729,
      "text": " But, well, I hadn't written it down properly and he thought he should talk about it because maybe I probably made a sign error somewhere. So I couldn't believe that gauge theories are so much different from scalar theories that you could change the sign of the beta function, which was the essential thing that happened here."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5149.821,
      "index": 196,
      "start_time": 5122.125,
      "text": " Now, before you go, professor, you have a program on how to become a good theoretical physicist. I'll place that URL on screen, a link to that website as well. Can you please talk about it for those who are listening who want to become researchers in physics, new students, maybe some existing researchers who want to improve their skills, follow the advice of a Nobel laureate? Yes. Well, indeed, I thought that I get many letters from people who"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5177.91,
      "index": 197,
      "start_time": 5150.265,
      "text": " who have a view of nature that isn't quite real, that doesn't agree with many of the things you know very well in science. So, let me try to give an answer to all of them, all of the more serious researchers, that they have to know about physics. And of course, all the standard things in physics, which you shouldn't skip, you shouldn't skip the understanding of Newton's laws or why planets move in elliptical orbits, you shouldn't skip"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5207.312,
      "index": 198,
      "start_time": 5178.507,
      "text": " The relations of the electric and magnetic fields by Maxwell, all those topics you have to learn first. You have to learn what thermodynamics is. And then I mentioned a sort of a dozen other topics in theoretical physics that you really have to understand. When you understand all these theories and you understand also what the limits are, like quantum mechanics, it's not believed to be exactly true, but true enough for practical purposes."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5229.838,
      "index": 199,
      "start_time": 5207.739,
      "text": " and you have to understand that then you can try to see if you see any gap here that you can fill in with a personal calculation that should improve what we know now and that's difficult difficult part of it you shouldn't just well this discard discard the old series"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5256.954,
      "index": 200,
      "start_time": 5230.401,
      "text": " without first having an idea about what to replace it with and what would be better than the replaced series. And now I get letters, of course, from people who discard the old theory and replace it with something they think is better. But I immediately see that there aren't any equations that you can use. You can't use that to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron or you can't use that to calculate the thermal properties of particles near the black hole and all these"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5284.77,
      "index": 201,
      "start_time": 5257.637,
      "text": " All these kind of questions which you now do know how to calculate. So you first have to know the existing and verified part of physics, which is an enormous amount of work. More than 100, maybe 200 years of science now fits in one big textbook. But to read it all, it takes lots and lots of time. And I thought that you have to calculate, not just read it, but also do the calculations to see that it works."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5310.469,
      "index": 202,
      "start_time": 5286.049,
      "text": " So it can't just be that one's new theory has to recapitulate all of the two hundred years of science of physics in particular, because even you're a champion of cellular automaton, someone could say, well, where is the magnetic moment of the electron to even five decimal places? You would say, well, that's not what this theory is about. I haven't gotten to that level. So it has to be more than just. Reproduce 200 years."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5333.473,
      "index": 203,
      "start_time": 5310.93,
      "text": " Yes, it is of course the reason why I didn't write so many papers on cellular automata, because there are so many things I don't know. But where I disagree with Steve Wolfram, who wrote a very thick book about cellular automata, but the book contains not much information that I can use. I want the rule, if you have a cellular automaton of this and that sort,"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5355.23,
      "index": 204,
      "start_time": 5333.951,
      "text": " Now find which elementary particles will occur in nature because of the similar automaton behavior. And I think that is possible in principle. And those particles might look like standard model particles, but what the exact rules are, how to do this calculation is still way beyond me because it's very, very difficult to see how these things hang together."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5379.07,
      "index": 205,
      "start_time": 5356.032,
      "text": " Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye bye. Hi there."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 5397.585,
      "index": 206,
      "start_time": 5379.428,
      "text": " Kurt here. If you'd like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my sub stack at kurtjymungle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time"
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      "text": " You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org. You can also just search my name and the word sub stack on Google. Since I started that sub stack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, sub stack for those who are unfamiliar is like a newsletter, one that's beautifully formatted. There's zero spam."
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      "end_time": 5453.882,
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      "start_time": 5425.93,
      "text": " This is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn't anywhere else. It's not on YouTube. It's not on Patreon. It's exclusive to the Substack. It's free. There are ways for you to support me on Substack if you want and you'll get special bonuses if you do. Several people ask me like, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the field of theoretical physics, of philosophy, of consciousness. What are your thoughts, man? Well,"
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      "end_time": 5484.036,
      "index": 209,
      "start_time": 5454.206,
      "text": " While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. And it's the perfect way to support me directly. KurtJaymungle.org or search KurtJaymungle substack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students. That's fantastic."
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      "end_time": 5509.531,
      "index": 210,
      "start_time": 5484.497,
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      "end_time": 5533.985,
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      "text": " Toe is actually the only podcast that they currently partner with. So it's a huge honor for me. And for you, you're getting an exclusive discount. That's economist.com slash toe. And finally, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it."
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      "end_time": 5559.445,
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      "text": " I know my last name is complicated, so maybe you don't want to type in Jymungle, but you can type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gain from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comment that toe listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on one of those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts, whatever podcast catcher you use. I'm there with you. Thank you for listening."
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    {
      "end_time": 5571.749,
      "index": 213,
      "start_time": 5559.821,
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      "end_time": 5589.872,
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      "text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
    }
  ]
}

No transcript available.