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Julian Barbour: When Physics Gets Rid of Time and Quantum Theory
April 29, 2025
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I think it's just possible that there really isn't any quantum mechanics at all. It's just a manifestation of classical physics that has not been recognized. This is a major discovery in Newton's theory of gravity, only four years old. This is probably the most important symmetry in physics. This is why I think we may have stumbled on the nature of creation.
Physics traditionally builds from notions of time and scale. However, today we have a treat with British physicist Julian Barbour, who argues that the universe is grounded fundamentally in relationships between particles. And this upends even the primacy of wave functions. All the evidence can in principle be explained without any wave function. Discarding external clocks and rulers, Julian develops something called shape dynamics.
This is where instantaneous configurations or snapshots
The whole story is incredibly much simpler than anybody thinks. Ordinarily, we rely on concepts like entropy increase and the past hypothesis to explain time's arrow. However, the second law applies to systems in a box. If the universe is not in a box, all bets are off. This relational view implies that quantum mechanics comes from the statistics of the ratios of the shapes between particles. Nothing but ratios.
You said that you have some radical ideas that you've developed recently with your main collaborator about the structure of creation. You're going to speak about what that means. You also have some ideas on consciousness and some new ideas about how quantum theory needs to be interpreted without reference to wave functions or Planck's constant. Please explain what all of that means.
Just about quantum mechanics. I think it's just possible that there really isn't any quantum mechanics at all. It's just a manifestation of classical physics that has not been recognized. But let's come to that because we need to build up to it step by step. And all of this has come from, in fact, it came from a very standard idea
That's been doing the rounds in attempts to create quantum gravity for 60 years because well nearly 60 years when the famous wheel of the wit equation suggested that the quantum universe was completely static there were just probabilities for different configurations if you had the simplest model universe of three particles that would form a triangle
According to the wheel of the equation you would just have probabilities for those triangles and nothing less now i've been. Thinking for a long time it's nonsense to say if this is three particles. That they have a triangle which has both the shape and the size because the size assumes you've got a ruler in addition to the universe if the three particles of the whole universe.
It's ridiculous to say that there's a ruler in addition to measure its size. So you must think just purely in terms of its size and sorry, its shape. So my idea was to, so in this idea with the Wheeler-Dewitt equation, people had been thinking that there's no sort of change overall, but what happens is part of the universe looks is
If you look what well you can see as i move my head my head is moving relative to the background so but you could have lots of snapshots where my head is in different positions relative to the background so you would have a heap of snapshots my head is there in different positions relative to the background and then they would say that my head is the hand of the moving clock
And that tells you what the rest of the universe so you'd have to have pictures with the rest of my room looking rather different than it is with just that beam above behind me. So this was called the sort of the internal time idea and it's people have been putting it forward different versions of what they would propose now
None of them had chosen something which was scale invariant and it was always a bit sort of, um, in videos, they were choosing out one part of the universe to be the clock and the rest to be the rest of the universe. So then I suggested, well, first of all, it should be something which is doesn't depend on size. It should be scale invariant. It should be just something that depends upon the size of the side of the shape.
And let's see what happened so you can consider I introduced a long time ago that the notion of shape space so if you have three identical particles their shape space it just consists of the complete set of all the shapes that those three particles can make.
There's one distinguished, which is the equilateral triangle, and then they get more and more pointed. So there's one, one particle here and two, and they get further out like that. Um, so I suggested that, um, quantum theory, the sort of the time of quantum theory should be something which measures that, that quantity and that quantity turns out to be very, very interesting. And,
When my collaborator so i wrote down i proposed a time time dependent Schrodinger equation where that quantity is the time now it's it's scale invariant so can't have a planks constant because planks content has got dimensions it's got the dimensions of action so that would mean already that planks constant would have to emerge out of the theory
I'm sorry what are you trying to measure you said you're trying to measure that what's the that. The of this quantity something that would be scaling variant when i wonder why don't we actually look at the on page one of because of the formula that which would sure well first of all let me this is very very interesting. A lot of this is coming from me reading live minutes back in nineteen seventy seven and live minutes said.
If there was no variety in the world, we couldn't say anything. We couldn't see anything. We wouldn't exist. I mean, you can see me talking because this variety, there's a lot of different structure in my head and behind me and things like that. And so Leibniz elevated variety to the maximum most important thing that you could have in anything. And it's surprising how few people think that way in theoretical physics.
You mean to say that in order for you to perceive something or in order for something to exist, there needs to be difference? There has to be difference. Yes. So I'm calling it variety. And so so then the question is, is suppose there are just the universe just consists of point particles or points and they exist in space. So then
Given those points distributed in space, what is the simplest scale invariant number which characterises the extent to which they are distributed or uniformly clustered?
so you know that's sort of the first thing i mean think about looking at the stars at night i mean wonderful if you're in arizona or somewhere and you can see you know there's there's the constellation of orion it's it's a it's a distribution of stars and it stands out uh this variety there and then there's large stretches of the sky where there's not much variety and then the other ones where there are
So then the question is can you express that mathematically so in in euclidean space suppose there are just three particles now here's my definition for variety so. They are the separations between. Let there be three particles and let the separations between them be a b and c now square all those separations and you can make as many as you like you just go on adding more however many separations you've got.
You take the square root of that and then you multiply it by the sum of 1 over a plus 1 over b plus 1 over c. Now if you look at that expression clearly if you multiply everything by x so everything in the square root you multiply by x so that makes it x squared so you can take the x squared out and it becomes x
on the top and then you do the bottom the same with the ones on the right and you get an x one over x so you get x over x equals one so that quantity has not changed it's it's scale invariant and this is really to me amazing that as i say this was found this quantity emerged in newton's theory of gravity
In a special situation when in the newtonian terms all the particles collide together but in reality what's happening is the shape is becoming an equilateral triangle that's the most interesting case it can also happen if they're all on a line but it's a very special shape and that's the only case i know in the whole of theoretical physics where something which does not depend on scale plays a role and
I increasingly come to think this is probably the most important symmetry in physics, far more important than the Lawrence group and all the other things that seem to be so very important. Uh, and it's, it's, it's really fascinating what, what, what that number does that that pure number there, it's such a simple number. Uh, and, um,
In Leibniz wrote a famous little book called the monodology in 1714. Well time doesn't exist so it could have been 1900s. Yes that's right yes but uh uh duration doesn't exist I would say instance of time exists they are like the images on a pack of cards or something like that.
All right stack like we showed that last time we spoke Yeah, just for people who are wondering about the last time we spoke it was a video that went quite viral actually Especially for how in-depth and technical it was and I'll place that link on screen and in the description. Yes so Leibniz Leibniz talked about looking at a town from different points of view and he says
They all look different but there's really just one one town there seen from different points of view and he says they're multiplied in perspective and then he says this is the means of obtaining as much variety as possible but with the greatest order possible.
And he certainly didn't have that expression that i've got their variety the one that i've just described with the square root and then the ones that the thing that multiplies it but i think this is the you could you could make many more like that but this is the absolute simplest one you can choose and in fact there's two three really fascinating things about it one is
that when you really look at newton's series and newton introduced these concepts of absolute space absolute time absolute space and with absolute space goes the notion of an absolute scale that there is a ruler outside the universe when you get rid of those things which newton added and you just keep his his notion of the gravitational force and his second law of motion
What you find is that the real core of Newton's theory for three particles is just that quantity that I've called variety there. It comes out of saying well there are points in space just like there are stars in the sky and lo and behold
The expression you use to characterize their distribution is right at the heart. It's the beginning and end of Newton's theory of gravity. Isn't that pretty surprising for us to have. Um, and then even, even more remarkable. And this was a discovery that was made about, um, four years ago. This, this came about because I've been talking for many years to,
A professor at the observatory in Paris about Newton's theory of gravity and particularly because there are Newtonian big bangs. What do you mean? So, um, back in 1907, a Finnish mathematician called Suntman asked in Newtonian terms, can all the
three particles so there's a three body problem that's three particles interacting with each other can they all collide together at a point and he said nobody's asked this question before but i'm going to prove that they can and what he meant by that is that that quantity that's the square root vanishes that that one that is the sum of the things that's that square root would vanish because that's the sort of that's the quantity which measures the size of
a Newtonian three-body universe, three-particle universe. Why can't it trivially vanish in the equilateral case that you mentioned as long as the masses are the same? They can in an absolute space, but if they start off and you imagine they've got a certain size, this is why it is so difficult to shed a lot of preconceptions that are built into us by the
What's the way we live on the surface of the stable earth? I mean, I come into my study, you see it behind me and it always seems to be the same size. Now, it's the same size relative to me. The ratio of the sizes doesn't change and that leads us to believe that sizes are absolute.
But without all the evidence from the universe around us and in the first place the world around us we couldn't say something like that. So if you start and you imagine that you've got an equilateral triangle of a given size. You can only make them the size vanish by bit by bit bringing the points closer to each other. But that's
That's, uh, it still says and it stays as an equilateral triangle. So however small you make it, it stays an equilateral triangle. Now, what it turns out in Newton's theory of gravity, when you try and do that, imagining that this quantity in the square root under the square root, it's the square root measures the size. Uh, you find that Newton's equations stop when you get to the equilateral shape.
The equations don't work any longer you can't go any further so and this was discovered in 1907 and there is a special condition they can't they can't have any angular momentum they can't be rotating at all but then in Newtonian terms if you run that the other way
What happens is that then that the shape changes so it starts off equilateral and then the shape changes and becomes more and more pointed and in fact then you find that two particles start going round each other and the other one goes off in the other direction so so things start happening but that's really a Newtonian big bang it starts. It starts with the equilateral triangle that's the first instant of time.
And then it things happen to the speak you you you go on there so that's all very interesting now this is this is twenty years two decades before hubble discovers expansion of the universe but it's it's sitting there in newtons theory and that equilateral triangle is is in some very real sense the first instant of time.
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After that things happen now if it didn't and moreover than a year later it was shown that that can happen with an arbitrary number of particles you can have a trillion particles they won't they can't all start off as equal out of triangle but they will start off with a very very very uniform shape won't be completely uniform it'll be somewhat like the one on the left hand one at the bottom of the illustration that i'm showing there
So the bottom left will be akin to the frw universe. What is the number of robots more you see that. I would say cosmology is very very suspect i've been discussing this with one or two really top cosmologists because there's no variety in it at all it's completely washed out.
And they do actually quite struggle so all of modern cosmology relies upon something called inflation and quantum effects while inflation is happening now in part it works remarkably well but it's all a bit ad hoc and and people don't quite know how it starts now the great joy about the newtonian theory is this always variety there.
And it will form structures. So that was the great problem with Friedman Robertson Walker in general relativity. How on earth does the structure form? What I mean to say is if you take a look at the bottom left one, that one looks like the homogenous universe that's isotropic, whereas the one on the right is what characterizes people's experience when they look up at the galaxies and the stars. Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away.
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What characterizes people's experience when they look up at the galaxies and the stars? Yes. But in fact, if you could, if you could see it, um, why don't we actually a better one? Why don't we go and look at page three on the left? This is again, equivalent to the first instant of time. And you'll see, uh, on the left, it's a, this is 5,000 particles, an incredible spherical ball.
That's unique, this extraordinary spherical ball. It only happens exactly with Newton's theory. And then on the right, there's an equatorial section through it. And you'll see, although it's very uniform, it's not perfectly uniform. So Newtonian theory is completely lacking that appalling problem that they had in cosmology with Einstein's theory, which starts the Friedman-Robertson walker.
When you say that people here are looking at particles, particles are usually defined with respect to some space-time symmetry. So for instance, in electrons like certain irreducible representation of the Poincare symmetry. So what sort of particle here is there if you don't have space in order for you to even have space-time? How are you defining particles? I'm just using Euclidean space.
Euclidean space is you can have different you can have points separated by Euclidean distances. Okay so these are just points in Euclidean space and you're calling those points particles. Let me I think
What i'm not doing is that it's very interesting the challenge i'm putting to people and to myself and my collaborators is let us make this absolutely the simplest possible way we can to explain all the variety that we find in the universe everything that we we find around us and things like that and in the end
Remember this is a point that the famous john bell made who made those amazing discoveries in quantum mechanics all the information from which. That comes out of these experiments that are done at sun is actually.
Images or information but it's a printout that the information is actually always it's a little bit like what you see on the page three you see you see black dots on white paper and then you see some words underneath saying what they mean so all everything that we know about the universe is deduced from well from variety to which we attach meaning because of the structure that it has
So it's, I think, I think it would be a very, very, this is what, this is my main project now with my main collaborators is just to see how far we can go in explaining everything we know about the universe in the utterly simplest possible terms. So first of all, ratios are essential. So I allow the different particles to have different
I allow the electromagnetic force or the electric charges to be much stronger than the gravitational mass the strength there so the electrostatics can be much much stronger than gravity.
And then the other thing of the ratios of separation so if you have a triangle one of the sides can be shorter than the other two so that that's a ratio there and in fact.
I would say that's the way to think about the expansion of the universe. If the if the equilateral triangle, if the sides of the of the triangle are aware of themselves, or shall we say that the triangle is aware of itself, like we have this effect of proprioception, this is the sense where
As i speak i know how far apart my two knees are and i can bring them together and i'm confident that they will bump when i do that's a pretty amazing property now if the universe is like that uh the shortest side is a triangle would would start off and say ah all my sides are equal uh but then after a bit it would say ah side a is shorter than the other two and side a will say ah
The universe is getting bigger because, uh, the other, the other particle is going away from the two of us and make side a. So that's how I think one should think of the expansion of the universe. That's not the way people think about it in cosmology. They talk about space expanding. Um, so I, I, I'm not saying this is going to be right. We're all going to get no bad prices in a few years or anything like that.
But what i'm saying is it's a very very good exercise that should be done to see if we can root out. All of the assumptions that don't really need to be made and i start and i think the consciousness has put a lot of. Wrong ideas into our head and.
the first one is closely related to one that i already spoke about before which is motion when i do that you see my hand moving now that's clearly an effect of consciousness that you can see me is clearly also consciousness but that you see me moving now is the movement as important as the instantaneous position of my finger
But the the position of my finger the instantaneous position of my finger must be more fundamental than it's being in different positions because you couldn't say that's in a move to a different position without those knowledge about the position. So if you look through the whole history of dynamics from Newton's great advance in 1687 all the way through they have
Theoreticians have put position on the same status as they've given motion the same status as position or rather momentum so momentum and position have the same status and that was formalized
In very beautiful mathematical theory by the great Irish theoretician Hamilton in the eighteen thirties. What they call canonical coordinates position and momentum a canonical coordinate and that goes right through that was the basis of the quantum mechanics that was then discovered by Heisenberg and by Schrodinger and in you see it exactly in Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle.
Where the position and the momentum are said to be equally important. You can't measure both of them accurately at the same time. There's always some uncertainty around it. But the underlying statement that it's right at the heart of the whole of quantum mechanics is that they are on an equal footing. But I think that's very, very suspicious. Particularly if really the reality. So what
In my book the end of time years ago i suggested that when we see a kingfisher in flight incredibly beautiful. What is really in our brain when we think we see the kingfisher in flight is service a six or seven snapshots arranged in encoded in neurons. They're all there in one instant and then.
Consciousness and the brain plays the movie for us. It's really a static arrangement of six or seven snapshots, which we then experience as motion.
Let me see if I can get this straight. So when movies first came out and they were something like 10 frames a second or so, something small, maybe even five frames a second, they were shown on some wheel and there was someone dancing or a horse moving. And they would say, look, the illusion of motion is being created because actually these are just different snapshots and you move them quick and your brain creates motion. You're saying actually that's what the world is. It's not just this film that produces the illusion of motion. The world produces the illusion of motion in concert with your consciousness or your
Yes, I would say it's the, if you say there are particles in my brain and there are particles in your brain and particles in my laptop screen and things like that, that's all interconnected. There are distances between all of these particles and I would say in my brain at this moment,
There's a whole lot of encoded images of you and myself because I can see myself as I talk to you and it's just that the brain and consciousness are playing the movie are making it appear continuous.
So the first task is that so but it's a huge task but it's a very clearly defined task is to say everything must be expressed in terms of separations between points and every experience we have must somehow be correlated explained by the
differences in the separation between points so in my image with the kingfisher the images of the kingfisher against the background there are differences so i've got my six or seven snapshots of the kingfisher but first of all the kingfisher's wings are in slightly different relative positions to each other and also relative to the bank of the river against which it is flying along so those are differences there so that's enough
The fact from which my experience of motion can be explained or correlated. Now a relatively easy one is the experience of heat. So we touch something and it's hot. But what when the old thermometers, the mercury thermometers with a bit of mercury in a tube,
How did that get the temperature measured well the the atoms of them or whatever the molecule they deform that the different particles in the mercury take they are moved slightly further apart. So it's not so if this if these ideas are right it's not that there is any real motion at all it's just that the
Greater separation between the particles when i touch it i feel that as heat so the the separations of the molecules in my finger when i touch the slightly hotter thing that that's then comes to me as the feeling that it's hotter that that that body is hotter than my finger
And it's, it's not to do with, so the standard story of a hot body is it's hot because there's lots of part of the particles are all moving around relative to each other at a terrific high speed. So this is saying, no, there could be a completely different explanation. This is, this is my principle. Reduce everything to the absolute minimum that you can do it. And I, I believe that just the relative positions.
All expressed as ratios of points are sufficient to explain everything that we experience. Let's linger on this for a moment. Can you explain so the traditional account of what temperature slash heat is and then what it would be in your model plus how that connects to entropy? Because as we were speaking about off air, you were suggesting that entropy was some emergent property or emergent illusion or not fundamental. Yes. So the
Since the well people were already suspecting it in soon after newton's time but by the mid nineteenth century people were suspecting that the really were atoms and that when we feel heat or hot bodies they really are just atoms or molecules.
Moving relative to each other and the faster they move the hotter the object the object is. And then they so then there was very brilliant work done from. Eighteen fifty through to eighteen seventy five by it started with somebody called rudolph cloudius he was supposed to who first formulated the second law of thermodynamics of that.
Very very simple that heat flows spontaneously from a hotter to a colder body but never in the opposite direction and very soon after that he started developing this atomistic explanation of the laws of thermodynamics which were that it's just a measure of how the particles are moving around that creates the impression of heat.
And then i'm maxwell the great maxwell develop the theory of electromagnetism he came in and he's in found the expression.
for the how the velocities change so clausius had originally just assumed that they all have the same velocity but maxwell saw no that can't be right some must be moving faster than others and then he proposed an expression which is called the the maxwellian thermal distribution the the expression for that and then the the numbers that have
the different velocities the different speeds that's then associated with what then became called the entropy so entropy is a measure of how things are spread out and how they're distributed so the easiest way to think about entropy is actually not where there's motion where you've just got checkers on a checkerboard so eight squares by you know eight by eight squares and you've got a whole lot of
Checkers so you got a thousand checkers so. You could put all the checkers on one square well there's only sixty four ways of putting all the checkers on one square the sixty four squares so the sixty four ways of doing that. But then the great insight that led to the definition of entropy was by.
Boltzmann who said there are vastly more ways of distributing the checkers by spreading them out uniformly on all the squares so you know you get a huge increase more and then how entropy is defined is you then actually take the the logarithm of that number of ways that you could distribute them so
the entropy will be minimal if you put all the checkers on one square and then it will go up to its maximum possible value if you distribute them in the most uniform way that you possibly can and then this leads to the idea that entropy defines the direction of time because if you had particles in a box and they all start off in one corner
They're all moving relative to each other but they're all in one corner so that means they've got a low entropy because they're not uniformly distributed and after a bit they'll bump around and bump into each other and then they'll spread out and after a while they'll fill the whole box uniformly so that was that was how the increase of entropy was explained and then
I can't remember whether I think it was Ludwig Boltzmann who first suggested that we get our notion of the direction of time from the increase of entropy so that that was how the idea that entropy was was very very significant and
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It then turned out that a huge number of things could be understood with this concept of entropy. But what is very significant and what then got totally forgotten was this final state where everything is uniformly distributed relies upon the box. If the box wasn't there, what would happen?
The reason this is all I would say intellectual inertia so the laws of thermodynamics came out were discovered all through an absolutely wonderful book that was published in 1824 by the Frenchman Sadi Carnot and Carnot was interested in what's the maximum efficiency that a steam engine can have.
And he didn't quite get it right but it got very close to it but what one thing that he did so the key thing well first of all if a steam engine is going to run continuously first of all you heat up the steam from the furnace and you expand the cylinder and that does some work moves the steam engine forward but then you've got to get it back again to
for continuous operation and to get it back again there's still some heat in there and you would have to exert some work so you've got to cool down that steam to get it back to the starting position and that wastes some of the energy so this was the the second that's one of the formulations of the second law of thermodynamics some of the energy some of the heat is is lost for continuous operation
I'm so that that was a great inside already if i saw the car now and then that was in formalized in later on but all of that. All of that still only. Works in the box so then when you look at all the these wonderful papers by clausius then then by maxwell and by both man and later on by the american gives.
They're all using systems in the box and what is interesting is. There's just one of them who really pointed out that his whole theory based on probability the probability of these distributions he said this will fail.
If the system i'm talking about can expand into infinite space unlimited space he puts that as a caveat he also says there must be a restriction on what the momenta can do if the momenta can become infinite my system won't work but he doesn't explore what happens if that's not the case and that's been virtually ignored i think i haven't seen anybody
draw attention to that is really very important before i did it myself about 10 years ago now that just makes you think when things are working very well because i mean the the the value that came out of this notion of entropy it's just amazing i mean the first quantum effects were discovered through the study of entropy endless results in
in all sorts of technical fields understanding communication Shannon with the notion Shannon entropy it's just incredible but all of them actually depend upon
Session that is that is either in the box or it's bounded also it's it's when there's a finite number of possibilities for example if you have a deck of cards with fifty two in it your chance of drawing the ace of spades is one of the fifty two, but if there are infinitely many cards in a deck your chance of getting a particular card is zero this is essentially the simplest form of what gibbs was saying my whole system will fail so,
This is just a good example of how science can go incredibly successfully for a long time without realizing the assumptions that are being made. Now, the great problem with entropy and the whole idea that it's what determines time, the direction of time,
Is that you have to have some initial state so i talked about all those molecules being in one corner of the box how does they get there. Now you this comes into what's called the past hypothesis so this already goes back to a debate with with boatsman in in in the eighteen ninety six.
Was there a special initial so the idea is if entropy is determining the direction of time well first of all one immediate problem is. We couldn't be talking to each other if if entropy hadn't already reach was entropy must be way below any possible maximum it could have otherwise we couldn't talk to each other it's it's obviously clear that the universe is not in maximal entropy.
No where near but if entropy is really the really is the fundamental quantity then the only way that you can explain that you and i can still talk to each other is that the universe must have started in an incredibly low entropy state. Which cannot be explained on the basis of the known laws of.
This is what Richard Feynman said about when was it 50 years ago or something, certainly 40, 50 years ago. He said to understand why we haven't got maximal entropy. Now, the only way to explain that is to add to the known laws, the assumption that in the past, there was a very special state of low entropy. And that's now been called the past hypothesis.
and people struggle to find out what it was like well i think this is i think this is this my conjecture now is that is completely and utterly wrong it's because entropy does not apply to the universe it's just naive extrapolation from what is perfectly true in a box
Now because all around us we can find ice, we can make ice in a refrigerator, we can put ice in the corner of a box and it will melt and then evaporate and then you will get what's called heat death. So already back in 1854, four years after the laws of thermodynamics were discovered, Helmholtz in Germany talked about the heat death of the universe. Everywhere, everything will be uniform and there will be no life heat death.
This has been a horrendous sort of nightmare for the universe, but it could be just a complete fundamental mistake in thinking that what happens in a box
Is a true model of what happens in the whole universe this is what my book the janus part is about in the paper that with my two collaborators tim koslowski and flavia mccarty we published eleven years ago it was in physical review letters when you mention that physics happens in a box are you referring to a closed system yes well this the danger with that word closed is are there
In dynamics people mean by that but there are no forces acting on the system in addition to the system you're thinking about. They're not meaning by that whether it's in a box or not so close system normally justice assumption that.
So you've got a hundred particles and they've got forces that act on each other, but there aren't other particles far away that are also exerting forces. So that word closed is a bit dangerous. I would prefer to say confined if I want to rather than closed. The reason I was asking about that is that there are studies in physics of open systems and there have been for decades, no?
by open systems what they mean is systems that interact with a thermal bath so basically what they so you can have you could have say particles kept within a membrane and but there are particles outside in what's called a thermal bath and and so heat heat and energy can pass between the exterior and that's what they mean by an open system
They don't mean, so I'm meaning something quite different when I'm in the Newtonian end body problem. If you in the simplest case of three particles in Newtonian terms, those three particles, if the energy and the angular momentum are exactly zero, then what all always happens in both directions of Newtonian time, you will always finish up with two particles going around each other.
forming a clock a rod and and a compass direction because of the way they behave and the third particle is going away in the other direction and that system the Newtonian size grows to infinity and that's what I call and that's not a confined system that's the one that I that's the one where we found an alternative
arrow of time which is nothing whatever to do with the entropy or the system in the box and it's precisely if we go back to page one it's precisely that quantity on on the expression on page one that i call the variety so those are the a b and c those are the lengths of the sides of the triangle and that quantity is scale invariant
But as the ratios of the sides change, that increases. That expression, just if it's just the three, you've got three particles and their separations between the pairs are A, B, and C, that quantity will start off. In fact, I think it's one over the square root of three when you do the calculation. That's the minimum value it can have.
As an equilateral triangle and then as it gets more and more pointed that quantity would increase not steadily but with fluctuations but it will go on increasing upwards and that defines an hour of time and I think that is much more likely to be what is really determining the direction of time in the universe as a whole than anything to do with entropy.
and it's based on three shows and and this is i mean it was recognized i mean the physical review letters they they sent it to five referees because we were saying here we've got a major new thing so they wanted to be sure they got it right and yeah and they then decided on the basis of what the referee said they gave it they gave it an acorn it's a sort of recognition as a special paper and then they
And then they also got a quite a distinguished person in quantum gravity to write comment on it. So, you know, it was recognized as being definitely interesting. Are these A, B and C's and D's and so on, are they allowed to be any real number?
Any real number greater than zero. So you have continuity in that you have a real line. Yes. So, so what I have, so in my minimal ontology, the minimum sort of assumptions I make about the universe is that there are points and you can say they're particles because they, but they have zero size. Very important. And this is the particles have zero size that enables you to define scale invariance very precisely. And then, um,
And then those ratios of the separations can change and they can go from the most uniform distribution that can have that's it's always a positive definite quantity so it's positive and it's always greater than zero and the absolute minimum is very very uniform but except for three or four particles where it's the equilateral triangle or the regular tetrahedron in nearly all cases
it's not exactly uniform and you can you can see that it's in page in page three that's that's really what it's that's what it's really like at its absolute minimum for 5000 particles the one on on the it's an incredibly spherical ball and on the right it's an equatorial section through but you see it's uniform but not exactly uniform and that's why that's why structure forms
Totally naturally in the Newtonian theory in the Newtonian Big Bang but they have such struggles with it in cosmology because because it's based on everything in general relativity is based on averaging things out and having continuous distributions of not of separations between particles but continuous distributions of fields
And that's that's where all the problem comes from in general relativity. Is there a reason that you say that the size is zero instead of saying that the size is ill defined or not unique? Well, the size is in if you imagine that there's a ruler outside the universe, then you can say the size is zero. That that's where on page one, that's where the quantity in under the square root can become zero.
But really if you say so one of my joke to my children i say when i'm when i'm buried on my gravestone inscribed nothing but ratios that that's the it's amazing how that is forgotten i mean it's.
Let me point out, it's forgotten by Einstein in his general theory of relativity because the key quantities that define his theory are proper time and proper distance. They are not ratios. So his theory does not rest on secure foundations. I'm not saying that it's, but it needs certainly sorting out the foundations of general relativity need to be properly clarified. And in fact, my
My collaborator Tim Koslovsky has gone a long way. I think in really putting general relativity in the shape it should be on much more secure foundations. They don't rest on this imaginary rule of an imaginary clock outside the universe.
Okay, let's talk about Newton. We'll get to Einstein. In our last conversation, I recall you said something about how Newton's gravity was inherently driving the universe towards states of increasing structural complexity and order. And you measure this with that scale invariant complexity, which I believe now is called variety. That's what I'm for. That's because I'm now coming back to my
think that that's the most uh well first of all complex we had we were calling it complexity for a long time but the problem with complexity everybody uses that word in many different senses and quite often it's not well defined we at least had a very well defined notion of complexity but now
I'm not calling it variety in a tribute to live that's because it was still live and it's that i was was thinking but i mean once i read live minutes back in nineteen seventy seven i was looking out for quantity to characterize variety and then it was.
It was in 2011 I realized that it was actually the Newton gravitational potential made scale invariant and this is actually so that second quantity on page one in the in the round brackets if you change the sign of that that's the Newton gravitational potential made scale invariant by the quantity which measures its size. Now how would you accommodate gauge fields relationally?
Well they have internal degrees of freedom but in fact actually in a way I would say the first what ought to have been discovered as the first gauge field is actually what my Italian collaborator Bruno Bartotti and I did in 1982 in our paper there.
That isn't a non-abelian gauge. The simplest non-abelian gauge theory is the three-body problem. That's because in rotations, when you have rotations, they do not commute. If you
If you have one rotation A and another rotation B, the effect of AB doing A first and then B is not the same as doing B first and then A, you get a different result. So that's an example of non-commutativity. Non-commutativity is right at the heart of quantum mechanics as it's formulated at the moment. So what Bertotti and I showed in 1982 is that
You that the Newtonian. And body problem for arbitrary number of particles, three or more. If the energy is exactly if the angular momentum is exactly zero, that is technically a non abelian gauge theory. Well, wait, just because you have something that doesn't commute, what makes it a non abelian gauge theory? It just makes it non abelian.
Because what really now you're getting into something that i call best matching which is what really is underlying gauge theory so if i have.
If I have two I don't have I got my I don't think I've got my trials now with which I have the trusty diorama but if I have to I'll have to just imagine that my two hands are two triangles that are not the same size and not exactly the same shape but I put one on top of the other
until i and i rotate them around until i get the difference to be absolutely minimum but i also divide by quantity so that i'm only talking about the shape so uh that's what i call best matching so if i if i don't worry about the overall size but just the shape so if sorry the the the the if i leave this the the size as they are so i've got two triangles
that are more or less the same size but they're not exactly the same so i put one on top of the other and i give each vertex the name one two or three i number them one two or three then as i put them in in any i put them in any position and then i will find that particle one has moved a certain distance so i take the mass of particle one
And the distance is, I've square that distance and multiply it by its mass. I do the same for particle two and the same for particle three. So then I've got a quantity which measures how they have not been brought to perfect overlap or the closest overlap you can get. But as I rotate one relative to the other, that quantity is positive. There must come just one precise position where that quantity is minimized. And that quantity, I say in that situation, I say the two
Triangles are best matched and the quantity is the best match thing and that is actually what is going on in in all of gauge theory in in more complicated situations than just with triangles but and that by the way is also what's underlies what's going on in general relativity but in a much more sophisticated form it's it's really just
Best matching as you go to the limit where the distance it's all expressed with what are called what are they called lead derivatives and things like that but the
In its absolutely simplest form it is what i call best matching that concept of best matching is no no you can find it cited every now and then in the literature people are recognizing that that's that is what's good and it's again something that you can visualize very very easily and so that that's actually what is underlying
Gauge theory and the simplest example is just with a triangle with three particles and in that case you get three particles whose angular momentum is exactly zero. So that's the condition that comes out of a gauge of a non-abelian gauge. It's the simplest non-abelian gauge theory. But all of the gauge theory is just that writ much larger.
And so is general relativity in in some of its key aspects. So I want to get to this whole quantum without quantum, because when people say something without something like John Verbeke is a philosopher, he says he wants a religion without religion. I always wonder like, what are you referring to? Because if my wife asked me to clean up, I could say, yeah, no, I'm doing the dishes without doing the dishes. So
So to justify that usage, what is quantum without quantum? What's being saved and what is the first quantum referring to that's different than the second quantum? Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California and for delivery. What I'm suggesting is that the
All the evidence on which quantum mechanics is based, can in principle be explained in a completely different way without any wave function and without any Planck's constant. That is the, if you like, the outrageous claim I'm making. So,
What I certainly can do, I think I can make a pretty plausible case that there could be a completely different explanation going on. So let's go back to the evidence on which quantum mechanics was based and what the founding fathers were trying to do from about 1925 through to about 1933 when the result was there.
So what they were trying to do almost, it was a huge role, was explain the structure of photographs taken in the laboratory. They were photographs of cloud chambers. So cloud, it's a wonderful story of how the cloud chamber was invented by, Wilson was the man who did it.
And then he, he, he was trying to imitate, make clouds, things like clouds. And that was a cloud shape. And suddenly he saw these curve tracks. He saw these tracks in this thing when he, when he, uh, it was in the meta stable state. Uh, and, and he, he, he did the thing which made it then form all these vapor bubbles. And suddenly in the vapor bubbles, he saw all these tracks. That was the discovery of cosmic rays.
But then the great mystery that they were trying to understand it when they were talking about the foundations of quantum mechanics was to explain the structure of photographs taken in a laboratory. That's and in fact, all of all of the evidence for quantum mechanics. So I did actually, I once did some practical work in astrophysics, which was to measure the
The spectral lines in the spectrum of a variable star and what I was looking at through a microscope was it was a photographic emulsion what I was looking at and as I went along it was where there was a double, where there were two spectral lines close to each other, a doublet.
And as you went along, it just got darker and darker. And then there was a place where it was darkest. That was the center of the spectral line. Then it went down again and then it got darker again. So that was a photograph. I was I was measuring the intent, the darkness in the photograph. So all the and that's so. That then was expressed in terms that was the raw data. I call that the raw data.
The evidence in the photographs, but then that was then processed data became interpreted in terms of frequencies and wavelengths. But when think about Newton, for example, when Newton saw the colors of the spectrum on the wooden paneling in his, his room in Cambridge. The structure of the molecules in his retina.
What correlated with very subtle changes in the chemical composition on the surface of the world. That's what was there. It was another was over a century before those that was then formalized as wavelengths and frequencies. So quantum mechanics in that form was based on
Not on raw data but on on process data as i like to say process food is not good for us so i think process data is bad for theorizing so the. No this is a completely different explanation possible for. Those.
cloud chamber photographs that wilson obtained okay suppose that at the instant at which that happens some deity could take a snapshot of the whole universe and that universe satisfies just one condition that quantity that i call the variety has a particular value
So suppose we have a universe with a trillion particles in it. Now there's a huge number of shapes that will all have the same value of the variety that can all have the same value of the variety. So right. So there, so the, the deity takes snapshots of all of them. And then he looks carefully through all of them. And then in one of them,
he finds in a tiny part of it is exactly the laboratory where the photograph is taken and the photograph itself. It's sitting there and the explanation is just determined by the statistics. There are probabilities of shapes and the explanation for why that
photograph is and the laboratory is in part of just one of those shapes is statistical and the fact that the variety has a particular value that is an explanation in principle now this brings in the difference between holism and reductionism the whole of physics
Certainly since Newton, but before that has been reductionist. All the variety has been washed away. Newton got rid of all the variety in his absolute space. And so what was left for these? It's very interesting to read the 1927 Solvay Conference when all the great founders of quantum mechanics got together and discussed its foundations.
They were all thinking very in very reductionist terms. The furthest they would think about things would be what could happen in a bar tree. They weren't thinking about what the effect of the whole universe might have. But that's very critical what the effect of the whole universe could be. Dirac had his large number hypothesis.
Yes, but he didn't manage to go anywhere with it. But in fact, this is the sort of thing that is that is coming out of these ideas that we're developing. So let's just look at the let's let's look on page one on that extraordinary rich filamentary structure there on the right. What are we looking at exactly?
What was it that created these images? That is just one. It's. It's a distribution of the particles that has a value of the variety, which is what is said to be critical. It's it's either a local minimum or a saddle. So so the value of it's it's a it's a value of the
variety, which if you change any of the particle separations by just a small amount, the variety doesn't change. That's a critical value. And that's the condition that has generated that thing. Okay, let me see if I got this correct. So if we were to pick a variety number, remember the equation is above, let's say we picked variety 110. So there are a variety of different ABCs that you can put in there to get you the number 110.
Now, if you look at these different numbers, maybe there's, I don't know how many of them, a trillion different numbers that can get you 110 depending on the amount of particles. If you look at it from a God's eye point of view and you take all the snapshots of what can be 110 and then you say, okay, if I was to vary this, would that change my variety by much? Oh, this changes my variety a great deal. Let me go to the next one. And you keep doing that until you get to one that changes the variety the least.
You're looking at that right here? Yes, that's going to be the complete. It's not just one part. If you so if in that one with all those filaments on the right on page one.
If you move any of the particles by a small amount, you won't change the variety. It will say essentially exactly the same. All of them can be changed by any one of them can be changed by a small amount without changing the variety. That's what has generated that particular structure. And by the way, there's a huge number like that. You know what factorial means. So essentially the number of ones like that
is a thousand times 999 times 900 all the way down to one it's just an incredible number of them it's incredibly creative this this quantitative variety.
But but why don't we why don't we briefly turn over the page because it's quite striking. So on page two, let's go to page two. Before we move on to page two, what was the point of showing this? Like what were you trying to convey on page one? Oh, yes, that's it. Yes, because there's a marvelous statistical act. Do you see if you could look at it with a with a bit of a magnifying glass, but you can see it with the eye already.
All the smallest separations are almost identical. You can't you won't find anywhere where two particles are very much closer to each other than the others and that's exactly do you that's because if you go up and look at the expression for the variety it's one over a plus one over b plus one over c so if any of those a b or c goes to zero then one over that quantity goes to infinity.
So and if you're fixing if you're fixing the value of the complexity. That's you can't do that because you'll you'll you'll overshoot. So the explanation so you will find it's incredible all of those smaller separations are incredibly nearly equal the smallest ones and that is a holistic explanation.
And by the way, it does exactly what the Pauli exclusion principle does in quantum mechanics.
The reason a friend of mine Harvey Brown makes this very very clear if if it wasn't in according to quantum mechanics if it wasn't for the Pauli exclusion principle if I just put my two hands together like that there should be the effect of a hydrogen bomb going off but it doesn't and that's because you can't in in terms of position you can't get two particles getting close to each other it stops them doing that
but this is just this is one of the reasons why i conjecture that there is no quantum at all because it's all just uh saying if i specify just one value of the variety and i've got to go through all values of if i'm going to start from from the lowest value and let the variety go on up making creating ever more different structures and we'll look at that in a moment um i've got to fix each
so i call that actually the i call that the age of of the shape so the age is zero when it is at absolute minimum and the age is is is slightly greater when it's above the minimum so the the difference between the variety at the value you've got and the absolute minimum could we have we call that the age of the shape that's my collaborator tim koslovsky and i and that's really if you think about it how do you
recognize how old things are well i mean just looking at you and me it's blindingly obvious i'm older than you so this is but everywhere we look we see with a glance we can say some things are older than others there's a there's a walnut tree out in front of the window where i'm looking at well if there was a small walnut tree next to it it was obvious would it be obvious which is the older one
And it's everywhere we look we see but also in stars stars are clearly some stars are much younger than others and those are the ones where they've only got hydrogen and helium in but as they get older there's more helium relative to hydrogen and then other nuclei come in as well. So everywhere in the universe we can see first of all the universe gets older
that's measured by its variety and then within it there's lots of substructures which also have their own relative ages relative to the whole of the universe so this is a quite different concrete way of thinking about
The universe and getting rid of time and replacing it by age i'm going to quote shakespeare now because i wrote an essay called the nature of time and then it is that shakespeare did not attempt to say what time is what the effect of time is and i quote.
His the start of his second sonnet when forty winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauties field. The effect of time is to make the wrinkles in my face. That's that's the effect of time. That is that's the measure of age.
and we should we should think of so so reductionism so so newton has not got an awful lot to answer for newton said time flows equably without relation to anything external well i mean he's just washed away all variety but the evidence for time is in in structure
Would this be a prediction against the heat death of the universe? Oh, absolutely. Yes. No, but if I'm right, it'll just go on getting more varied forever, ever richer structure. And it has been doing that up to now. How do you do that without contradicting the second law? That the second law applies to systems in a box. If the universe is not in a box, all bets are off.
Now, if the universe is open, what is it open to? Well, first of all, if you remember what I said, it's got to be on my gravestone, nothing but ratios. And if it's three particles, if it's a universe of three particles, all it means is that
One of the separations can get infinitesimally small compared with the distant. So you've got two particles here and one out there and all getting larger just means that the ratio of when you divide the long set the two long separations by the short one that just goes to infinity. That's what that's what an open universe is that is a universe that can go expand forever but it's a ratio nothing but ratios.
Okay, so would you say the ratios are what are fundamental or the particles that create the ratios? It seems to me like the ratios are defined in terms of the particles. Well, yeah, I would say you need both. You need both. I mean, you've got to have the particles. And then what counts is the ratios of the separations between them.
My understanding is that you're using this to get certain features of physics like the born density or spin or fermions and poly exclusion as you mentioned. It seems like a toy universe that you're just toying with. Are you suggesting that this is what the universe is fundamentally? If I'm right, that is what it is fundamentally. In other words, it sounds like you're saying there is no box.
There are no fields. Maybe there is no absolute space. There is no so and so there is none of this. There must be a yes somewhere like some ontological fundamental quantity or object. So what is fundamental in your theory?
Hi, everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like minded pilgrimers. By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here.
Hit subscribe and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJayMongol dot org. What is fundamental in your theory? I cannot do my theory without assuming. I think they could just even be mathematical points. You didn't call them.
Particles that points because they have zero size but there are non vanishing distances between them but the ones it's not the distances. The distance is a so to speak there to enable you then to form ratios of distances the things that are really real.
Ontological other ratios of the distances between points that's my absolute minimum that i can do and i'm certain i can already build an extraordinarily interesting universe with just that and nothing else but to really get all the effects of the different types of forces i will need something a more generalized form of the variety that one that is so
simple there that's the simplest one you can possibly but it's extraordinary how much already comes out of that and and it's just
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People just don't know about it. What about the number of points? Well, I've now got a way of doing that with infinitely many points. So an infinite Euclidean space with infinitely many points in, and there are different ages of that universe. At its age zero, if you take
Any large region containing say a trillion particles, the distribution will be very, very uniform. A little bit later when the age is a bit greater and you take a large number, it'll look like the one on the right. But I tell you what, let's just briefly go on to page two because it's very interesting to see the effect of this
A colleague of mine, Hemant Shukla, did this for me. This is 12 of these shapes of 100 particles each arranged in order of age. Age zero is top left, as you see, very uniform. And then the variety between the one top left and the next one along. I've said that's the unit of age. And then they're ordered in age.
And look how structure forms, very uniform. Here you see, this is why I think we may have stumbled on the nature of creation. Just look as that structure increases as you go from age zero through to 4.6 bottom right. So you start getting these filaments and you notice the filaments all have the smallest separations
pretty much the same then in that age 1.1 you've suddenly got something which looks like a pair of scissors two circles have appeared and then look particularly one that I really particularly like is age 3.2 bottom left there's two perfect filaments and then a near perfect circle and this is in
two dimensions that's why the separations gets slightly larger as you go out to the edges that wouldn't happen in three dimensions you have filaments in three dimensions by the way there is um she's working on it now with a supercomputer in lisbon maria lorenzo who started working on these ideas she's doing a masters and and she's actually she's already found
These are some delightful photos or mock-ups or what have you. What is it supposed to be? Are you supposed to be showing this is galactic formation? This is how life emerges. This is what's going on in your brain. Like what are we supposed to infer from this?
Well, I would say it's paradigmatic of all of those. I would say the, what is the most fundamental aspect of our existence? It's the huge range of shapes of things that we see around us. If you go back to the ancient atomists,
I've read, I got halfway through it, it's a long poem by Lucretius on the nature of things, 150 BC or something, I think he wrote it around then. And you see what he was really interested in was the explanation of the shapes of things. And he talks and to explain that
You have all these remarkable shapes i mean children look like their parents all oak trees have the same sort of structure and things like that and to explain that he introduces atoms equals the primordial seeds which have shapes and different sizes and each.
macroscopic thing he wants to explain invokes a new primordial seed with the appropriate shape and size to explain it but this just shows early on what really fascinated people was the different shapes you see around us so if you think about it that is actually the most fundamental feature of our experience the huge variety of shapes
I mean, if people are watching this and can see both of us at once when it's shown, they'll just see that you look pretty different from me. You've still got a good head of hair and so forth. I mean, just look going around at the different amount of structure that there is. That is what should be explained. But and what we've stumbled on
Way of explaining shapes and you see it and it's all done with this one quantity. The simplest form of variety already does extraordinarily well. As you see it going through this 12 ages, 12 ages of man, 12 possible shapes of a hundred particle universe in two dimensions. But already there, it's pretty interesting. Look, look at it. And each one of those.
What would you say to someone who says if this is the case that we're just increasing in variety and life is evidence of this variety or life should emerge then why is life only on earth? Why don't we observe much more of an abundance of life? Wouldn't this predict that life should be far more abundant than observed?
I think this could be, um, I don't think Maria in Lisbon is going to be able to do the numerical calculations that would show this, but the, I mean, what one can anticipate at the moment, all the calculations have so far been done show what the variety is like.
Very close to its absolute minimum. I would think that if the variety gets much larger, what will happen? Well, it's intuitively clear it will. You will form lots of clumps, lots of clumps of things. And it will be like the first stars forming. And we know that within the stars, there are hydrogen and helium nuclei.
These are pretty well the simplest structures you could have. So I would think that when the complex, when the variety is really got a large value, what you will find typically is things that look like stars and then the stars will form, will gather together in what look like galaxies.
And within the stars you will just have very simple structures so the simplest so what are molecules if you just think about do you remember these sort of dumbbell images you have of molecules with sort of connecting things like that those are basically relatively simple shapes each of those considered by themselves will have a low value of their variety so a star will
Basically, it's nuclear various complex structural complexity. So there won't be any really individual rich structures within a style. They'll just it'll just be full of lots of things that look much the much the same and quite interesting structured. Now, the only place where
In the solar system where we know there is interesting life is on the surface of the earth and it's I think you could show that these ideas will predict that very special complex structures will only emerge in very special places. I mean within the solar system there's a lot of speculation
um that there could be life of some form in in the satellites of saturn and jupiter in the liquid hanging in their seas whether they would be talking to each other like you and me is another matter i mean one one rather doubts that but um
This seems to be, I mean, I think the widespread view is that very basic forms of matter, of life are likely to form. I mean, after all, we know on the earth that very simple unicellular life developed extremely soon, but then it was a long, long time before it became multicellular and really interesting structures appeared. So my guess is that
It will be a statistical question and depend upon the value of the variety, the age of the age defined by something analogous to what I call the variety that that's where, but there will be sophisticated structures appearing. I mean, if we go back to page one, you can just see how extraordinary the structures are there.
Now suppose you had a one electron universe. Do you imagine that there would be multiple points that comprise that universe? Or would it just exist? Well, first of all, I would. Well, they. Well, first of all, you've got to have three particles have an interesting shape.
Oh, no, what I meant to say is the electron, if you want to think of the electron as the wave function of the electron, like some people conflate the electron with its wave function, but it doesn't matter. The point is that you have an electron, what we think of as a point particle. Does that correspond to a point particle in your picture or would an electron itself comprise 1000 different points like it would correspond to n equals 1000 here? Oh, no, no, no, I would. I would certainly think I would certainly think of the electron as being just one point.
Okay, so then what gives rise to the probabilities like the born density if you don't have a wave function here? Oh, right. Well, let's go on over to... Let's now turn to page four.
This is where there are probabilities and brawn densities with how they're being. Interesting. So, you see, this is called the shape sphere. This concept appeared in about 30 years ago. It was formalized in Newton's theory of gravity for when there are three particles. The shape of a triangle is defined by two numbers, two internal angles define the shape of a triangle. So we've got this image here.
so because the surface of a sphere is two-dimensional and two numbers define the shape of a triangle you can represent all possible shapes of triangles by points on the surface of a sphere so that's shown here so the the shapes that are mirror images are at the same longitude but opposite latitudes
So there's two equilateral triangles, one at the top and one at the bottom, the North Pole and the South Pole.
then there are the degenerate triangles which are really just on a line that's three particles on the line and that's the equator and there are six special points there where they're all in a line and one particle is bang in the middle between the other two but then there are uh situations where two particles are very close to each other and one is on the right so that's where
I think you're seeing it in color aren't you there? That's where two particles are very close to each other compared with the distance to each other and as they get very close to each other that's where the variety becomes infinite, goes up to an infinitely high peak.
And then the contours the white lines are contour values of the variety so the variety has its absolute minimum of the equilateral triangle and then it increases and it goes all the way up to infinity.
where two particles are that's where it gets deep red and the two particles are very close much closer to each other than the distance to the third and then there's a sad there are three saddles where the value it's like when you go through a mountain pass well you can see that it's image the image is in the in the
The contour lines that I've shown that now the key thing about this, I was talking about mess best matching before that best matching defines a distance, a uniquely defined distance between shapes. It just relies upon points in Euclidean space. So there is a well-defined distance on the surface of that sphere. So the surface of the sphere, it's a pure number. It has the area for pie.
now suppose you have a tiny little patch there on that sphere which corresponds to possible shapes of the triangles which are a set of triangles which have nearly the same shape but they're so they can be represented as a little patch of a certain area so let that little patch have the area a
So then the probability it's a probability measure or an existence measure if you like so you divide a by four pi and that tells you the probability that you will have shapes that satisfy the condition that they lie in that point and then very interestingly as you go along one of those contours you can have the same condition you can say i want i'm going to fix the value of the variety
And then I'm going to say, I'm going to mark out the stretches along that contour where no angle is greater than 90 degrees. And then I've got the probability of finding what's the probability of finding triangles that have less than all their angles are less than 90 degrees.
And that's mathematically uniquely defined. Just come straight out of Euclidean geometry. And if you say that the contour lines define time or age, I would prefer to call it age, that's analogous to the time in quantum mechanics. It plays the role of time in quantum mechanics. And then you've got probabilities for the shapes at that given time.
And that is like a born density. So there is a born density existing. Shapes have a born density without any wave function and without any Planck's constant. Okay. So I see how shapes can have a probability associated with them, but to call them a born density, you'd have to show some correspondence between that and the born density. So have you been able to calculate that? Well,
Not if I don't need to do it, because the only evidence that supports quantum mechanics is the outcome of experiments. I mean, if you read Heisenberg on interpreting quantum mechanics, he says we can never know what the wave function is doing or the particles that are being governed by the wave function. All we can see is the outcome of a machine.
So if we can reproduce all the results of the measurements in this way, that's all we need. So all the evidence for quantum mechanics is in the Bohr density. The hard evidence. I mean, read John, there's a really wonderful paper by John Bell called Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists. And he just makes the point that, you know,
the evidence i think he uses the expression it you know you you could say the evidence for quantum mechanics is in a is in a printout on on on paper all right let's go to the last page what are we looking at here oh well this is this is some of this is a very interesting thing so this is what i'm hoping the sort of study so this is intriguing structure that comes this is very typical
This was made for me by Manuel Escuedo who was that Spanish student who found the amazing filamentary structure that we were just looking at and what it turns out you get these filaments and the filaments because it's in two dimensions the filaments the separations get larger as you get to the edge of the disk overall you can see that clearly
But what is what comes every time is that there's a hierarchy. So in the middle, there's the I'm seeing it in black and white, but it's I think it's in red, isn't it? That's right. The long filament, the separations of the shortest ones there. And then you'll see in different colors. I got Manuel to color them according to the length of the separations.
And you see there's a hierarchy that comes in every single one that you generate. There's a hierarchy of separations. Well, that sort of smells a little bit of quantum mechanics. It's not understood. As of now, I mean, the experts in Newtonian gravity, and I know, I think I can say I know the top five or six quite well,
They were very struck with that discovery that the Spanish Manuel made and there's no understanding as yet exactly why these particular structures are forming but it's very remarkable that they do. This is a major discovery in Newton's theory of gravity only four years old, I mean centuries after Newton formulated his theory.
And why do you get this hierarchy that's going up there? Well, I'm hoping that Maria in Lisbon and perhaps others can can do further tests that will show what what's the cause, you know, provide an explanation for it, but it is quite straight. So this again, you see what should have happened would be to do
I would say this is where you could sort of talk about consciousness that if I had asked Manuel to make the smallest separations with violet color, the next blue and go through the spectrum where the shortest separations, which looks like shortest wavelengths, get violent and then blue and go all the way through to red. So then the ones that are scattered around would be red. Then I would say that. Consciousness is the great gift
um in that it is it is highlighting the structure so it's it first of all there is a structure in the universe it's a mathematical the universe has a mathematical structure but if it was just points with all the same color so to speak just black dots on white paper you wouldn't it wouldn't look nearly so interesting as this done with with the colors there so um
So I think consciousness does two things. First of all, it's enabling us to, well, it makes us aware of anything without consciousness. We would know nothing. But secondly, it's picking out the details in a very wonderful way, but it's also making life very exciting because think about motion. We just recently had the most famous race horse in the world. The grand national was run in this country.
A week or two ago i mean nothing is more exciting than the finish of a horse race and everybody gets incredibly excited. But maybe it's really all just photographs and then consciousness is making it appear to us is an incredibly exciting horse race.
And giving us, I use the expression, a great gift, the great gift of consciousness, but at the same time, deceiving us monumentally. So I think that the challenge is to see what, how we can explain everything
With the absolute minimal ontology, and I don't think we can go less than points in Euclidean space, but I think virtually everything can be done with ratios of things in Euclidean space. You can have things that are analogous to ratios of charges. I mean, we know that there are color charges and so forth. So I think all of this could be could be built into. I mean, if
If these ideas catch on and people get going lots of people will be exploring with supercomputers what can be done because the calculations I mean a colleague of mine pointed out I said well maybe
Maybe the shapes of molecules will just come out. Here I'm sticking my neck out. I mean, I've said this to distinguished physicists and they've just shaken their head in despair. He's crazy. He's a nice chap, but he's crazy. I mean, quantum mechanics just cannot be used to calculate the shapes of carbon molecules, anything that's a bit complicated. I mean, it's
All sorts of tricks have to be used to say what the shapes are going to be. But the calculations that generate these shapes are really very simple by comparison. I mean, they're not, they're not, they're not differential. They're not really, they're very simple equations. Okay. So let me see if I have a handle on this. So you have violet, you have indigo, you have blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Okay.
Let's look at this image. So the way that the colors are determined is you look at a specific node here. So a specific circle and you say, what is the distance to your closest neighbor? And let's say it's distance is on our screen, 10 pixels. Then you give it red. If it's 20 pixels, you give it orange and so on. Okay. So you have some assignment like that. Then are you saying that consciousness is what takes this set? Like I mentioned, there's red, green, orange, and so on.
There's a set of colors here. Consciousness is what does the assignment of the colors to the particles? It assigns the colors in accordance with as the separations go up. And there is this very striking fact that there is always a hierarchy of separations in all of the ones that come out. And I'm saying that that is
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That is how
Color comes into our existence we can't explain why i mean i don't think it will ever be possible to explain why anything exists but what we can do is to describe describe it um there's let me see if i can find it uh have i got there's a nice there's a i read a nice book on consciousness by christoph koch
and he he says what is consciousness he says it's experience what we experience and then he has a nice definition of experience how about can i find it curt here several days later i received an email from julian which i'm going to read
Dear Kurt, I couldn't find the passage in the book The Feeling of Life Itself by Christophe. Having said that consciousness is manifested to us as experience, he says that experience has five distinct and undeniable properties. Each one exists for itself, is structured, informative, integrated, and definite. I liked that as soon as I read it, and it struck me that it bears a close resemblance to my mathematical notion of shape.
I would say I would encourage everybody to think about what experience is like and whether, you see, it's not just that motion, all of things like change. I mean, when we listen to music, with the sound change, the quality of the, you know, the frequency of the things that the sound is changing, the speed,
All of that has profoundly influenced the way people trying to understand the world have formed their concepts and maybe it's deceiving them. Let me say another thing. It's very extraordinary with Maxwell and the electromagnetic field.
What first of all newton himself was very worried by his theory of gravity because it seemed to allow instantaneous action of the distance and he said himself that this was anyone who was trained in philosophical thinking could that was on the unacceptable hand.
I read a very interesting book about the work of Faraday and Maxwell and Faraday did these incredible, marvellous work he did and he discovered various laws and he on a continental trip he'd met Ampere in Paris and they'd become good friends and Ampere using Newtonian type action at a distance
had derived mathematical equations which explained all of faraday's results faraday had been hugely impressed we all know the story of iron filings on a paper above a magnet and they make these patterns and that had led faraday to think of uh what did he call it lx
Electrotonic field or something but anyway had the idea of lines of force and then Maxwell started giving that mathematical form and somewhere Maxwell says Faraday's results can all be explained perfectly well by action at a distance but I do not like action at a distance
so he introduces an electromagnetic field and an ether which can vibrate and fluctuate and the energy is conserved now that's very much if you think about it how much our experience our conscious experience so the aristotle said that there must be a force the force must act to keep anything moving because because of friction if you stop
So then newt managed to show that was wrong with the national motion one something i got moving in his head in his absolute space it would go on forever but. To be changed that required forces and those forces acted over instantaneously over arbitrary distances and newton hated that and maxwell hated that.
uh and so they looked for a diff so he looked for different explanation that's what led to the theory of the electromagnetic field well that led to all sorts of of problems within 25 years because of all the problems with explaining black body radiation and there are still that led on to all the mysteries of quantum mechanics now there's another thing before that in 1854 this was 20 years before Riemann before
Maxwell Riemann had developed the theory of arbitrarily curved spaces arbitrary and that then became the theory of general relativity now. All mathematicians are perfectly happy with the idea of differently curved spaces and I think that comes do you
Do you talk about plasticine on the other side of the Atlantic? This stuff with your hands? What is it called? Plasticine? Yeah. So here, look, look at this creature here. This is this is from Beatrix Potter's Johnny Townmouse and Timmy Willie. This is this is Johnny Townmouse that my wife made, molded it with plasticine.
Alright this is a shape you can you can you can make it like that and it so this is I think this is why theoretical physicists are perfectly happy with the idea of a curved space so they they start off with flat space and then they have a torus
It's all the things you can form with your hand, with plasticine, and that makes them perfectly happy with this thing. Then the problem starts arising. Which of all these possible spatial structures is the one that's describing the universe? Well, possibly you've just created a monumental problem.
Consciousness is misled you into doing that because you've got the idea so so what did remun do he had this idea. Completely against what live net said remun first of all got rid of all variety in the world only left was so to speak the shape of plasticine but without any markings on it at all. Completely featureless but shape without feature without without markings.
And then he imagined coordinates on it like stars in the sky but not real stars like you do see in the sky but imagined and then if they're close to each other in terms of infinitesimal distances then he imagined that you've got Euclidean geometry holding locally but I well this it was a huge
Achievement mathematically it's phenomenal that then that turned into geometry that can fair be dynamical in general relativity and seems to work very well. But it may all be a colossal invention.
And all come because of our feeling that we can hold plasticine or dough when when I bake bread so I make buns. Maybe just that feeling that consciousness gives us that we can make things of different shape. Leads theoreticians to. Use these forms but then creates all sorts of problems for them I was talking to a collaborator about this and then.
Did you know which which which shape of the universe are we going to have the great mathematician. He said. It's why don't we just stick with new tone with with euclidean geometry it is so simple because then he said the.
Instruments the measuring things that we use to measure geometrical relationships those are determined by the forces that are acting on the particles in the in the substance in the thing so so the fact that i got a ruler here that ruler has got the shape it has. And it's nice and smooth because of the forces that are holding it together and so maybe
Geometry comes about the actual geometry that we measure and experience is a combination could be a combination of euclidean geometry and then the forces that are acting and then in 1921 Einstein published a paper called Geometry and experience and he gives a very nice description of Pankara's theory and he says
So Spetsae Aeterni and Poincare is correct. Basically he's right, that is correct, but then Einstein was so worried about quantum mechanics and what the real forces were, he says it's too early for us to tell, but maybe he
Maybe nucleotide geometry is all we need. That's what that's what Poincare conjectured. And if you look at those extraordinary structures that in those images I've shown and bear in mind that there are probabilities for shapes that the existence of something like a born density for shapes is rock solid mathematics. I'm not understanding.
Are you suggesting that our insistence on locality over non-locality is the problem? That we shouldn't be troubled with action at a distance? I think so because you see what is what is regarded as the greatest miss. I think most people who think about quantum mechanics would say the greatest mystery in quantum mechanics is that entanglement correlations are set up instantaneously between
points in space that are arbitrarily far apart and that's so when when Schrodinger back in 1935 coined expression entanglement in English there was a German word he'd used before but he called it entanglement in English at the end of the second paper he talks about
When these he says it's very well confirmed in quantum mechanics in the laboratory, but the speed of light is not coming into play. But he said, I'm not alone. But if these entanglement correlations can be established, it's effectively instantaneously. I will find that repugnant like other people do.
And this is the great mystery. But to confirm that these have been established later on, there must be something like a photograph of a large enough area to show the two places that are correlated all together in a single photograph. So the evidence ultimately is in a photograph. It's in a snapshot.
So if you can then explain why that snapshot exists, that there's a high probability for that snapshot, which is a shame. If there's a, then you've explained, you've explained the things. So nobody, nobody finds the existence. So all you take any separate, you take N particles in Euclidean space.
there's something like n squared divided by two separations ratios of separations between the two and they're all correlated there's colossal correlation between points in euclidean space nobody nobody thinks that's mysterious because they're so used to euclidean space but maybe that's what's behind
entanglement correlations maybe that's what we call entanglement correlations are just reflections of those correlations it could be as simple as that it's a possibility i'm not saying it's right nothing is is certain but i think it's a challenge it's keeping me happy in my old age how is it you're able to come up with so many ideas at 88 um and also stay excited about physics and math
I guess just I'm a lucky person. You know, I went back right back in 1969, I decided to go independent because I wanted to think about time and motion and things these these fundamental things. And I did this incredibly boring job of translating scientific Russian for 28 years. Yes, good money earning very stable, desperately boring. But then
six years in nineteen seventy four i got my first paper was in nature got. Pretty well received quite publicized by nature and that brought you my wonderful collaborator bruno bertotti in italy we work together for about six years.
And then I felt my pension fund was big enough in 1996 so I retired then and I've had now 29 years I've had all to myself and I've had some very very good collaborators I had had a
I was very lucky to meet somebody called Jimmy York who'd done very important work on general relativity and he put me on to working with his Irish, his first PhD student, Neil and Baruch Hu, the Irishman in court. Both of them sadly died recently but I collaborated with the Irishman for about 10 years with other students and then
Tim Koslowski who's now I would say my main collaborator he's he's been working with me on and off now for since 2008 I met him at the perimeter Institute and things are just more and more things are coming the real breakthrough came with this alternative explanation of the arrow of time within Newtonian theory the
The fact that I came up with that was reading Leibniz. It was over 30 years from reading Leibniz to then finding the expression for the variety and finding that it was already sitting inside Newton's theory of gravity and then just more and more ideas came and
The German collaborator was very important. He was the one who, because I was thinking that, because before Manuel had made that remarkable discovery at the observatory in Paris, I had been thinking that
The smallest separations would be why the electron doesn't fall to the nucleus in the atom, but that would be the thing. But when I discussed that with Timmy, he said, no, no, you should think of it in terms of the Pauli exclusion principle, which applies to fermions, which behave in a quite different way from bosons, photons behave in a quite different way. So I'm now suspicious whether there are any photons at all.
but that the it's the fermions exist and interesting and that we have an explanation of why they can't all sit on top of each other it's just that at any given value of the complexity because that expression you know go back and shows the expression for the variety on page one it's it's that second factor in the round brackets where the separations one over a plus one over b
so if a goes to zero that immediately becomes infinite so you just it's incredibly so i think this is the exponent this could be if if we're right if tim and i are right this is the explanation for the stability of matter you cannot at a given age of we are at a certain age of the universe that is quite clear i mean the the that i don't think anybody would argue with that the universe is age
and that means that it has a certain value of its variety if you go far enough out you will get a value of the variety because that's again we haven't we haven't even looked at the evidence for that but that's an actually it might be just interesting to look at that that's page i think that was was it page page three yes let's let's look at page three we have looked at that that
There's something incredibly special about. The two factors that define the variety and are in in the Newtonian theory so the fact that you get this incredibly uniform ball of five thousand particles and then on the right that section through it which is very very uniform but not exactly uniform that's.
Only possible in three dimensions where you're multiplying a potential which is one overall by quantity which increases as all.
So the thing that's under that square root increases as the distance with the distances and the other one goes as inversely as the distance and that scale invariant quantity in three dimensions this is related to Newton's potential theorem. Newton was very proud of this theorem which explains why celestial bodies which are not rotating are perfectly spherical and it's a unique property of
uh three dimensions and that particular combination one upon r multiplied by r making it scale invariant that's pretty impressive so that satisfies the cosmological principle it looks the universe looks the same wherever you are so that's the holy grail of cosmologists but they struggle to get it and and and and and it's all done with this pretty strange
I just spoke to Neil Turok who also is against inflation. That was when Koslovsky and Flavio McCarty, my two main collaborators at the time, were at perimeter when
Neil was the director and he heard me talk about it and he liked in fact he has a paper out recently which apparently cited our work or me I forget exactly I think he may have cited the Janus point but that again I would say maybe theoreticians are looking you where we have this expression to look at gift gift horse in the mouth do you have that in across the other side or maybe we do I haven't heard it
Well it means if you're offered a horse for free and then you say I'm going to first look and see if it's got good teeth then that's thought to be pretty crazy so it's saying looking at a gift horse to check the teeth but you know I just think it's just possible
That the whole story is incredibly much simpler than anybody thinks and that. As I was saying, because you can mold because my wife was able to mold the plasticine into the shape of Timmy Willie, Johnny Townmouse, but it was also Timmy Willis up there too. This this enables.
Theoreticians to think that three-dimensional space can come in all these incredible different possibilities. I mean, this was the Poincare conjecture, which wasn't it the Russian who proved it eventually in three dimensions, the most difficult one.
Julian,
I'd love to continue to speak with you. I have so many questions. So we'll have to have a part three questions like where does spin come from, which I'm sure you can get to next time. And I know that scale invariance in three dimensions is broken in the standard model because of masses.
So I want to know about how your theory accommodates masses as well. You can feel free to comment on this shortly. But anyhow, I want to talk to you about so many more topics and questions. It'll have to wait until next time. If you want to comment on how masses come about, that's fine. But if you want to save that until next time, and we use this as a teaser for people to salivate at, then I would say let's stop now because there's so much work to be done. I would say all that
is established so far is certain really big possibilities have been opened up i think the possibility that there is there just is no quantum mechanics it's just probabilities of shapes has been opened up as a real possibility that consciousness has
Misled us into introducing many more complicated many more possibilities than need be so that's great that's great it worked for the theoreticians to say which one might be realized when in fact the simplest one would have been perfectly good all along.
That's all i'll say at the moment um now i'm now 88 whether i'll get much further we'll see but if people start doing it it'll be very interesting to see what maria in lisbon finds with with her analysis with the
With the supercomputer that she's working on now maybe some striking things will come that maybe somebody watching this will come up with some some idea and i'm getting approached to somebody from india is talking to yesterday he's decided to avoid. Going into academia avoid the publish or perish syndrome and he's he's now starting to study all these ideas and show dynamics maybe he'll come up with something you know it's. I think it's.
It should be explored. That's the challenge I put out. Is the universe much, much simpler than people have thought? But nevertheless, incredibly rich, thanks to consciousness. Thank you. Well, pleasure talking to you.
I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share. And as always, feel free to contact me.
New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts?
While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
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"text": " Physics traditionally builds from notions of time and scale. However, today we have a treat with British physicist Julian Barbour, who argues that the universe is grounded fundamentally in relationships between particles. And this upends even the primacy of wave functions. All the evidence can in principle be explained without any wave function. Discarding external clocks and rulers, Julian develops something called shape dynamics."
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"text": " The whole story is incredibly much simpler than anybody thinks. Ordinarily, we rely on concepts like entropy increase and the past hypothesis to explain time's arrow. However, the second law applies to systems in a box. If the universe is not in a box, all bets are off. This relational view implies that quantum mechanics comes from the statistics of the ratios of the shapes between particles. Nothing but ratios."
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"text": " You said that you have some radical ideas that you've developed recently with your main collaborator about the structure of creation. You're going to speak about what that means. You also have some ideas on consciousness and some new ideas about how quantum theory needs to be interpreted without reference to wave functions or Planck's constant. Please explain what all of that means."
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"text": " Just about quantum mechanics. I think it's just possible that there really isn't any quantum mechanics at all. It's just a manifestation of classical physics that has not been recognized. But let's come to that because we need to build up to it step by step. And all of this has come from, in fact, it came from a very standard idea"
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"text": " That's been doing the rounds in attempts to create quantum gravity for 60 years because well nearly 60 years when the famous wheel of the wit equation suggested that the quantum universe was completely static there were just probabilities for different configurations if you had the simplest model universe of three particles that would form a triangle"
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"end_time": 288.217,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 262.363,
"text": " According to the wheel of the equation you would just have probabilities for those triangles and nothing less now i've been. Thinking for a long time it's nonsense to say if this is three particles. That they have a triangle which has both the shape and the size because the size assumes you've got a ruler in addition to the universe if the three particles of the whole universe."
},
{
"end_time": 318.097,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 288.712,
"text": " It's ridiculous to say that there's a ruler in addition to measure its size. So you must think just purely in terms of its size and sorry, its shape. So my idea was to, so in this idea with the Wheeler-Dewitt equation, people had been thinking that there's no sort of change overall, but what happens is part of the universe looks is"
},
{
"end_time": 343.899,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 318.797,
"text": " If you look what well you can see as i move my head my head is moving relative to the background so but you could have lots of snapshots where my head is in different positions relative to the background so you would have a heap of snapshots my head is there in different positions relative to the background and then they would say that my head is the hand of the moving clock"
},
{
"end_time": 370.145,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 344.258,
"text": " And that tells you what the rest of the universe so you'd have to have pictures with the rest of my room looking rather different than it is with just that beam above behind me. So this was called the sort of the internal time idea and it's people have been putting it forward different versions of what they would propose now"
},
{
"end_time": 397.398,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 370.725,
"text": " None of them had chosen something which was scale invariant and it was always a bit sort of, um, in videos, they were choosing out one part of the universe to be the clock and the rest to be the rest of the universe. So then I suggested, well, first of all, it should be something which is doesn't depend on size. It should be scale invariant. It should be just something that depends upon the size of the side of the shape."
},
{
"end_time": 419.326,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 397.978,
"text": " And let's see what happened so you can consider I introduced a long time ago that the notion of shape space so if you have three identical particles their shape space it just consists of the complete set of all the shapes that those three particles can make."
},
{
"end_time": 446.118,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 420.162,
"text": " There's one distinguished, which is the equilateral triangle, and then they get more and more pointed. So there's one, one particle here and two, and they get further out like that. Um, so I suggested that, um, quantum theory, the sort of the time of quantum theory should be something which measures that, that quantity and that quantity turns out to be very, very interesting. And,"
},
{
"end_time": 474.138,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 447.142,
"text": " When my collaborator so i wrote down i proposed a time time dependent Schrodinger equation where that quantity is the time now it's it's scale invariant so can't have a planks constant because planks content has got dimensions it's got the dimensions of action so that would mean already that planks constant would have to emerge out of the theory"
},
{
"end_time": 503.831,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 474.445,
"text": " I'm sorry what are you trying to measure you said you're trying to measure that what's the that. The of this quantity something that would be scaling variant when i wonder why don't we actually look at the on page one of because of the formula that which would sure well first of all let me this is very very interesting. A lot of this is coming from me reading live minutes back in nineteen seventy seven and live minutes said."
},
{
"end_time": 531.374,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 504.275,
"text": " If there was no variety in the world, we couldn't say anything. We couldn't see anything. We wouldn't exist. I mean, you can see me talking because this variety, there's a lot of different structure in my head and behind me and things like that. And so Leibniz elevated variety to the maximum most important thing that you could have in anything. And it's surprising how few people think that way in theoretical physics."
},
{
"end_time": 557.056,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 531.698,
"text": " You mean to say that in order for you to perceive something or in order for something to exist, there needs to be difference? There has to be difference. Yes. So I'm calling it variety. And so so then the question is, is suppose there are just the universe just consists of point particles or points and they exist in space. So then"
},
{
"end_time": 570.384,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 557.858,
"text": " Given those points distributed in space, what is the simplest scale invariant number which characterises the extent to which they are distributed or uniformly clustered?"
},
{
"end_time": 595.606,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 571.169,
"text": " so you know that's sort of the first thing i mean think about looking at the stars at night i mean wonderful if you're in arizona or somewhere and you can see you know there's there's the constellation of orion it's it's a it's a distribution of stars and it stands out uh this variety there and then there's large stretches of the sky where there's not much variety and then the other ones where there are"
},
{
"end_time": 625.606,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 595.606,
"text": " So then the question is can you express that mathematically so in in euclidean space suppose there are just three particles now here's my definition for variety so. They are the separations between. Let there be three particles and let the separations between them be a b and c now square all those separations and you can make as many as you like you just go on adding more however many separations you've got."
},
{
"end_time": 651.92,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 626.288,
"text": " You take the square root of that and then you multiply it by the sum of 1 over a plus 1 over b plus 1 over c. Now if you look at that expression clearly if you multiply everything by x so everything in the square root you multiply by x so that makes it x squared so you can take the x squared out and it becomes x"
},
{
"end_time": 679.804,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 652.483,
"text": " on the top and then you do the bottom the same with the ones on the right and you get an x one over x so you get x over x equals one so that quantity has not changed it's it's scale invariant and this is really to me amazing that as i say this was found this quantity emerged in newton's theory of gravity"
},
{
"end_time": 709.275,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 680.452,
"text": " In a special situation when in the newtonian terms all the particles collide together but in reality what's happening is the shape is becoming an equilateral triangle that's the most interesting case it can also happen if they're all on a line but it's a very special shape and that's the only case i know in the whole of theoretical physics where something which does not depend on scale plays a role and"
},
{
"end_time": 737.108,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 710.299,
"text": " I increasingly come to think this is probably the most important symmetry in physics, far more important than the Lawrence group and all the other things that seem to be so very important. Uh, and it's, it's, it's really fascinating what, what, what that number does that that pure number there, it's such a simple number. Uh, and, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 760.555,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 737.671,
"text": " In Leibniz wrote a famous little book called the monodology in 1714. Well time doesn't exist so it could have been 1900s. Yes that's right yes but uh uh duration doesn't exist I would say instance of time exists they are like the images on a pack of cards or something like that."
},
{
"end_time": 786.869,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 761.015,
"text": " All right stack like we showed that last time we spoke Yeah, just for people who are wondering about the last time we spoke it was a video that went quite viral actually Especially for how in-depth and technical it was and I'll place that link on screen and in the description. Yes so Leibniz Leibniz talked about looking at a town from different points of view and he says"
},
{
"end_time": 807.534,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 787.21,
"text": " They all look different but there's really just one one town there seen from different points of view and he says they're multiplied in perspective and then he says this is the means of obtaining as much variety as possible but with the greatest order possible."
},
{
"end_time": 837.227,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 809.462,
"text": " And he certainly didn't have that expression that i've got their variety the one that i've just described with the square root and then the ones that the thing that multiplies it but i think this is the you could you could make many more like that but this is the absolute simplest one you can choose and in fact there's two three really fascinating things about it one is"
},
{
"end_time": 867.227,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 837.739,
"text": " that when you really look at newton's series and newton introduced these concepts of absolute space absolute time absolute space and with absolute space goes the notion of an absolute scale that there is a ruler outside the universe when you get rid of those things which newton added and you just keep his his notion of the gravitational force and his second law of motion"
},
{
"end_time": 889.667,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 867.841,
"text": " What you find is that the real core of Newton's theory for three particles is just that quantity that I've called variety there. It comes out of saying well there are points in space just like there are stars in the sky and lo and behold"
},
{
"end_time": 917.995,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 890.998,
"text": " The expression you use to characterize their distribution is right at the heart. It's the beginning and end of Newton's theory of gravity. Isn't that pretty surprising for us to have. Um, and then even, even more remarkable. And this was a discovery that was made about, um, four years ago. This, this came about because I've been talking for many years to,"
},
{
"end_time": 944.394,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 918.404,
"text": " A professor at the observatory in Paris about Newton's theory of gravity and particularly because there are Newtonian big bangs. What do you mean? So, um, back in 1907, a Finnish mathematician called Suntman asked in Newtonian terms, can all the"
},
{
"end_time": 975.213,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 945.282,
"text": " three particles so there's a three body problem that's three particles interacting with each other can they all collide together at a point and he said nobody's asked this question before but i'm going to prove that they can and what he meant by that is that that quantity that's the square root vanishes that that one that is the sum of the things that's that square root would vanish because that's the sort of that's the quantity which measures the size of"
},
{
"end_time": 1004.957,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 975.725,
"text": " a Newtonian three-body universe, three-particle universe. Why can't it trivially vanish in the equilateral case that you mentioned as long as the masses are the same? They can in an absolute space, but if they start off and you imagine they've got a certain size, this is why it is so difficult to shed a lot of preconceptions that are built into us by the"
},
{
"end_time": 1026.135,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1006.084,
"text": " What's the way we live on the surface of the stable earth? I mean, I come into my study, you see it behind me and it always seems to be the same size. Now, it's the same size relative to me. The ratio of the sizes doesn't change and that leads us to believe that sizes are absolute."
},
{
"end_time": 1052.773,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1026.903,
"text": " But without all the evidence from the universe around us and in the first place the world around us we couldn't say something like that. So if you start and you imagine that you've got an equilateral triangle of a given size. You can only make them the size vanish by bit by bit bringing the points closer to each other. But that's"
},
{
"end_time": 1080.606,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1053.302,
"text": " That's, uh, it still says and it stays as an equilateral triangle. So however small you make it, it stays an equilateral triangle. Now, what it turns out in Newton's theory of gravity, when you try and do that, imagining that this quantity in the square root under the square root, it's the square root measures the size. Uh, you find that Newton's equations stop when you get to the equilateral shape."
},
{
"end_time": 1105.998,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1081.152,
"text": " The equations don't work any longer you can't go any further so and this was discovered in 1907 and there is a special condition they can't they can't have any angular momentum they can't be rotating at all but then in Newtonian terms if you run that the other way"
},
{
"end_time": 1133.882,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1107.329,
"text": " What happens is that then that the shape changes so it starts off equilateral and then the shape changes and becomes more and more pointed and in fact then you find that two particles start going round each other and the other one goes off in the other direction so so things start happening but that's really a Newtonian big bang it starts. It starts with the equilateral triangle that's the first instant of time."
},
{
"end_time": 1156.561,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1134.258,
"text": " And then it things happen to the speak you you you go on there so that's all very interesting now this is this is twenty years two decades before hubble discovers expansion of the universe but it's it's sitting there in newtons theory and that equilateral triangle is is in some very real sense the first instant of time."
},
{
"end_time": 1184.974,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1158.404,
"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": 1212.637,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1186.271,
"text": " After that things happen now if it didn't and moreover than a year later it was shown that that can happen with an arbitrary number of particles you can have a trillion particles they won't they can't all start off as equal out of triangle but they will start off with a very very very uniform shape won't be completely uniform it'll be somewhat like the one on the left hand one at the bottom of the illustration that i'm showing there"
},
{
"end_time": 1235.026,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1212.637,
"text": " So the bottom left will be akin to the frw universe. What is the number of robots more you see that. I would say cosmology is very very suspect i've been discussing this with one or two really top cosmologists because there's no variety in it at all it's completely washed out."
},
{
"end_time": 1261.544,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1235.742,
"text": " And they do actually quite struggle so all of modern cosmology relies upon something called inflation and quantum effects while inflation is happening now in part it works remarkably well but it's all a bit ad hoc and and people don't quite know how it starts now the great joy about the newtonian theory is this always variety there."
},
{
"end_time": 1290.93,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1261.954,
"text": " And it will form structures. So that was the great problem with Friedman Robertson Walker in general relativity. How on earth does the structure form? What I mean to say is if you take a look at the bottom left one, that one looks like the homogenous universe that's isotropic, whereas the one on the right is what characterizes people's experience when they look up at the galaxies and the stars. Just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching away."
},
{
"end_time": 1314.633,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1291.391,
"text": " 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": 1338.643,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1314.633,
"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": 1356.527,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1338.643,
"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": 1378.592,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1356.527,
"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 u.s.a. whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting landscape of global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage"
},
{
"end_time": 1405.503,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1378.592,
"text": " It goes far beyond just headlines. 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": 1422.381,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1405.759,
"text": " Thanks for tuning in, and now let's get back to the exploration of the mysteries of our universe. Again, that's economist.com."
},
{
"end_time": 1453.063,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1423.899,
"text": " What characterizes people's experience when they look up at the galaxies and the stars? Yes. But in fact, if you could, if you could see it, um, why don't we actually a better one? Why don't we go and look at page three on the left? This is again, equivalent to the first instant of time. And you'll see, uh, on the left, it's a, this is 5,000 particles, an incredible spherical ball."
},
{
"end_time": 1480.333,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1453.541,
"text": " That's unique, this extraordinary spherical ball. It only happens exactly with Newton's theory. And then on the right, there's an equatorial section through it. And you'll see, although it's very uniform, it's not perfectly uniform. So Newtonian theory is completely lacking that appalling problem that they had in cosmology with Einstein's theory, which starts the Friedman-Robertson walker."
},
{
"end_time": 1510.759,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1480.913,
"text": " When you say that people here are looking at particles, particles are usually defined with respect to some space-time symmetry. So for instance, in electrons like certain irreducible representation of the Poincare symmetry. So what sort of particle here is there if you don't have space in order for you to even have space-time? How are you defining particles? I'm just using Euclidean space."
},
{
"end_time": 1528.541,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1511.22,
"text": " Euclidean space is you can have different you can have points separated by Euclidean distances. Okay so these are just points in Euclidean space and you're calling those points particles. Let me I think"
},
{
"end_time": 1556.152,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1529.991,
"text": " What i'm not doing is that it's very interesting the challenge i'm putting to people and to myself and my collaborators is let us make this absolutely the simplest possible way we can to explain all the variety that we find in the universe everything that we we find around us and things like that and in the end"
},
{
"end_time": 1572.159,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1556.783,
"text": " Remember this is a point that the famous john bell made who made those amazing discoveries in quantum mechanics all the information from which. That comes out of these experiments that are done at sun is actually."
},
{
"end_time": 1602.671,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1573.097,
"text": " Images or information but it's a printout that the information is actually always it's a little bit like what you see on the page three you see you see black dots on white paper and then you see some words underneath saying what they mean so all everything that we know about the universe is deduced from well from variety to which we attach meaning because of the structure that it has"
},
{
"end_time": 1633.166,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1603.729,
"text": " So it's, I think, I think it would be a very, very, this is what, this is my main project now with my main collaborators is just to see how far we can go in explaining everything we know about the universe in the utterly simplest possible terms. So first of all, ratios are essential. So I allow the different particles to have different"
},
{
"end_time": 1652.705,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1634.121,
"text": " I allow the electromagnetic force or the electric charges to be much stronger than the gravitational mass the strength there so the electrostatics can be much much stronger than gravity."
},
{
"end_time": 1666.732,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1653.097,
"text": " And then the other thing of the ratios of separation so if you have a triangle one of the sides can be shorter than the other two so that that's a ratio there and in fact."
},
{
"end_time": 1688.507,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1667.654,
"text": " I would say that's the way to think about the expansion of the universe. If the if the equilateral triangle, if the sides of the of the triangle are aware of themselves, or shall we say that the triangle is aware of itself, like we have this effect of proprioception, this is the sense where"
},
{
"end_time": 1718.643,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1689.224,
"text": " As i speak i know how far apart my two knees are and i can bring them together and i'm confident that they will bump when i do that's a pretty amazing property now if the universe is like that uh the shortest side is a triangle would would start off and say ah all my sides are equal uh but then after a bit it would say ah side a is shorter than the other two and side a will say ah"
},
{
"end_time": 1748.541,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1719.189,
"text": " The universe is getting bigger because, uh, the other, the other particle is going away from the two of us and make side a. So that's how I think one should think of the expansion of the universe. That's not the way people think about it in cosmology. They talk about space expanding. Um, so I, I, I'm not saying this is going to be right. We're all going to get no bad prices in a few years or anything like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.968,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1748.985,
"text": " But what i'm saying is it's a very very good exercise that should be done to see if we can root out. All of the assumptions that don't really need to be made and i start and i think the consciousness has put a lot of. Wrong ideas into our head and."
},
{
"end_time": 1803.66,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1774.445,
"text": " the first one is closely related to one that i already spoke about before which is motion when i do that you see my hand moving now that's clearly an effect of consciousness that you can see me is clearly also consciousness but that you see me moving now is the movement as important as the instantaneous position of my finger"
},
{
"end_time": 1833.063,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1804.497,
"text": " But the the position of my finger the instantaneous position of my finger must be more fundamental than it's being in different positions because you couldn't say that's in a move to a different position without those knowledge about the position. So if you look through the whole history of dynamics from Newton's great advance in 1687 all the way through they have"
},
{
"end_time": 1848.029,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1833.729,
"text": " Theoreticians have put position on the same status as they've given motion the same status as position or rather momentum so momentum and position have the same status and that was formalized"
},
{
"end_time": 1876.664,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1848.677,
"text": " In very beautiful mathematical theory by the great Irish theoretician Hamilton in the eighteen thirties. What they call canonical coordinates position and momentum a canonical coordinate and that goes right through that was the basis of the quantum mechanics that was then discovered by Heisenberg and by Schrodinger and in you see it exactly in Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle."
},
{
"end_time": 1905.947,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1877.108,
"text": " Where the position and the momentum are said to be equally important. You can't measure both of them accurately at the same time. There's always some uncertainty around it. But the underlying statement that it's right at the heart of the whole of quantum mechanics is that they are on an equal footing. But I think that's very, very suspicious. Particularly if really the reality. So what"
},
{
"end_time": 1935.367,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1907.108,
"text": " In my book the end of time years ago i suggested that when we see a kingfisher in flight incredibly beautiful. What is really in our brain when we think we see the kingfisher in flight is service a six or seven snapshots arranged in encoded in neurons. They're all there in one instant and then."
},
{
"end_time": 1948.865,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1935.759,
"text": " Consciousness and the brain plays the movie for us. It's really a static arrangement of six or seven snapshots, which we then experience as motion."
},
{
"end_time": 1979.36,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1949.36,
"text": " Let me see if I can get this straight. So when movies first came out and they were something like 10 frames a second or so, something small, maybe even five frames a second, they were shown on some wheel and there was someone dancing or a horse moving. And they would say, look, the illusion of motion is being created because actually these are just different snapshots and you move them quick and your brain creates motion. You're saying actually that's what the world is. It's not just this film that produces the illusion of motion. The world produces the illusion of motion in concert with your consciousness or your"
},
{
"end_time": 2006.032,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1979.36,
"text": " Yes, I would say it's the, if you say there are particles in my brain and there are particles in your brain and particles in my laptop screen and things like that, that's all interconnected. There are distances between all of these particles and I would say in my brain at this moment,"
},
{
"end_time": 2024.94,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2006.408,
"text": " There's a whole lot of encoded images of you and myself because I can see myself as I talk to you and it's just that the brain and consciousness are playing the movie are making it appear continuous."
},
{
"end_time": 2048.814,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2025.879,
"text": " So the first task is that so but it's a huge task but it's a very clearly defined task is to say everything must be expressed in terms of separations between points and every experience we have must somehow be correlated explained by the"
},
{
"end_time": 2079.121,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2049.189,
"text": " differences in the separation between points so in my image with the kingfisher the images of the kingfisher against the background there are differences so i've got my six or seven snapshots of the kingfisher but first of all the kingfisher's wings are in slightly different relative positions to each other and also relative to the bank of the river against which it is flying along so those are differences there so that's enough"
},
{
"end_time": 2104.889,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2080.043,
"text": " The fact from which my experience of motion can be explained or correlated. Now a relatively easy one is the experience of heat. So we touch something and it's hot. But what when the old thermometers, the mercury thermometers with a bit of mercury in a tube,"
},
{
"end_time": 2132.381,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2105.52,
"text": " How did that get the temperature measured well the the atoms of them or whatever the molecule they deform that the different particles in the mercury take they are moved slightly further apart. So it's not so if this if these ideas are right it's not that there is any real motion at all it's just that the"
},
{
"end_time": 2157.739,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2132.858,
"text": " Greater separation between the particles when i touch it i feel that as heat so the the separations of the molecules in my finger when i touch the slightly hotter thing that that's then comes to me as the feeling that it's hotter that that that body is hotter than my finger"
},
{
"end_time": 2186.886,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2158.473,
"text": " And it's, it's not to do with, so the standard story of a hot body is it's hot because there's lots of part of the particles are all moving around relative to each other at a terrific high speed. So this is saying, no, there could be a completely different explanation. This is, this is my principle. Reduce everything to the absolute minimum that you can do it. And I, I believe that just the relative positions."
},
{
"end_time": 2216.886,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2187.346,
"text": " All expressed as ratios of points are sufficient to explain everything that we experience. Let's linger on this for a moment. Can you explain so the traditional account of what temperature slash heat is and then what it would be in your model plus how that connects to entropy? Because as we were speaking about off air, you were suggesting that entropy was some emergent property or emergent illusion or not fundamental. Yes. So the"
},
{
"end_time": 2240.879,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2217.739,
"text": " Since the well people were already suspecting it in soon after newton's time but by the mid nineteenth century people were suspecting that the really were atoms and that when we feel heat or hot bodies they really are just atoms or molecules."
},
{
"end_time": 2269.872,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2241.323,
"text": " Moving relative to each other and the faster they move the hotter the object the object is. And then they so then there was very brilliant work done from. Eighteen fifty through to eighteen seventy five by it started with somebody called rudolph cloudius he was supposed to who first formulated the second law of thermodynamics of that."
},
{
"end_time": 2295.162,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2270.333,
"text": " Very very simple that heat flows spontaneously from a hotter to a colder body but never in the opposite direction and very soon after that he started developing this atomistic explanation of the laws of thermodynamics which were that it's just a measure of how the particles are moving around that creates the impression of heat."
},
{
"end_time": 2304.838,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2295.486,
"text": " And then i'm maxwell the great maxwell develop the theory of electromagnetism he came in and he's in found the expression."
},
{
"end_time": 2331.049,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2305.947,
"text": " for the how the velocities change so clausius had originally just assumed that they all have the same velocity but maxwell saw no that can't be right some must be moving faster than others and then he proposed an expression which is called the the maxwellian thermal distribution the the expression for that and then the the numbers that have"
},
{
"end_time": 2361.169,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2331.459,
"text": " the different velocities the different speeds that's then associated with what then became called the entropy so entropy is a measure of how things are spread out and how they're distributed so the easiest way to think about entropy is actually not where there's motion where you've just got checkers on a checkerboard so eight squares by you know eight by eight squares and you've got a whole lot of"
},
{
"end_time": 2385.742,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2361.169,
"text": " Checkers so you got a thousand checkers so. You could put all the checkers on one square well there's only sixty four ways of putting all the checkers on one square the sixty four squares so the sixty four ways of doing that. But then the great insight that led to the definition of entropy was by."
},
{
"end_time": 2410.299,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2386.032,
"text": " Boltzmann who said there are vastly more ways of distributing the checkers by spreading them out uniformly on all the squares so you know you get a huge increase more and then how entropy is defined is you then actually take the the logarithm of that number of ways that you could distribute them so"
},
{
"end_time": 2439.77,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2410.759,
"text": " the entropy will be minimal if you put all the checkers on one square and then it will go up to its maximum possible value if you distribute them in the most uniform way that you possibly can and then this leads to the idea that entropy defines the direction of time because if you had particles in a box and they all start off in one corner"
},
{
"end_time": 2464.497,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2440.196,
"text": " They're all moving relative to each other but they're all in one corner so that means they've got a low entropy because they're not uniformly distributed and after a bit they'll bump around and bump into each other and then they'll spread out and after a while they'll fill the whole box uniformly so that was that was how the increase of entropy was explained and then"
},
{
"end_time": 2486.561,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2465.026,
"text": " I can't remember whether I think it was Ludwig Boltzmann who first suggested that we get our notion of the direction of time from the increase of entropy so that that was how the idea that entropy was was very very significant and"
},
{
"end_time": 2516.988,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2487.756,
"text": " Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.COM today to save on your first order."
},
{
"end_time": 2544.326,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2518.268,
"text": " It then turned out that a huge number of things could be understood with this concept of entropy. But what is very significant and what then got totally forgotten was this final state where everything is uniformly distributed relies upon the box. If the box wasn't there, what would happen?"
},
{
"end_time": 2569.258,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2545.196,
"text": " The reason this is all I would say intellectual inertia so the laws of thermodynamics came out were discovered all through an absolutely wonderful book that was published in 1824 by the Frenchman Sadi Carnot and Carnot was interested in what's the maximum efficiency that a steam engine can have."
},
{
"end_time": 2595.674,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2570.35,
"text": " And he didn't quite get it right but it got very close to it but what one thing that he did so the key thing well first of all if a steam engine is going to run continuously first of all you heat up the steam from the furnace and you expand the cylinder and that does some work moves the steam engine forward but then you've got to get it back again to"
},
{
"end_time": 2620.111,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2596.118,
"text": " for continuous operation and to get it back again there's still some heat in there and you would have to exert some work so you've got to cool down that steam to get it back to the starting position and that wastes some of the energy so this was the the second that's one of the formulations of the second law of thermodynamics some of the energy some of the heat is is lost for continuous operation"
},
{
"end_time": 2648.234,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2620.708,
"text": " I'm so that that was a great inside already if i saw the car now and then that was in formalized in later on but all of that. All of that still only. Works in the box so then when you look at all the these wonderful papers by clausius then then by maxwell and by both man and later on by the american gives."
},
{
"end_time": 2669.787,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2648.626,
"text": " They're all using systems in the box and what is interesting is. There's just one of them who really pointed out that his whole theory based on probability the probability of these distributions he said this will fail."
},
{
"end_time": 2697.125,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2670.299,
"text": " If the system i'm talking about can expand into infinite space unlimited space he puts that as a caveat he also says there must be a restriction on what the momenta can do if the momenta can become infinite my system won't work but he doesn't explore what happens if that's not the case and that's been virtually ignored i think i haven't seen anybody"
},
{
"end_time": 2726.203,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2697.995,
"text": " draw attention to that is really very important before i did it myself about 10 years ago now that just makes you think when things are working very well because i mean the the the value that came out of this notion of entropy it's just amazing i mean the first quantum effects were discovered through the study of entropy endless results in"
},
{
"end_time": 2741.766,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2727.108,
"text": " in all sorts of technical fields understanding communication Shannon with the notion Shannon entropy it's just incredible but all of them actually depend upon"
},
{
"end_time": 2772.671,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2742.858,
"text": " Session that is that is either in the box or it's bounded also it's it's when there's a finite number of possibilities for example if you have a deck of cards with fifty two in it your chance of drawing the ace of spades is one of the fifty two, but if there are infinitely many cards in a deck your chance of getting a particular card is zero this is essentially the simplest form of what gibbs was saying my whole system will fail so,"
},
{
"end_time": 2798.336,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2773.575,
"text": " This is just a good example of how science can go incredibly successfully for a long time without realizing the assumptions that are being made. Now, the great problem with entropy and the whole idea that it's what determines time, the direction of time,"
},
{
"end_time": 2821.954,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2799.121,
"text": " Is that you have to have some initial state so i talked about all those molecules being in one corner of the box how does they get there. Now you this comes into what's called the past hypothesis so this already goes back to a debate with with boatsman in in in the eighteen ninety six."
},
{
"end_time": 2851.015,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2823.558,
"text": " Was there a special initial so the idea is if entropy is determining the direction of time well first of all one immediate problem is. We couldn't be talking to each other if if entropy hadn't already reach was entropy must be way below any possible maximum it could have otherwise we couldn't talk to each other it's it's obviously clear that the universe is not in maximal entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 2875.486,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2851.749,
"text": " No where near but if entropy is really the really is the fundamental quantity then the only way that you can explain that you and i can still talk to each other is that the universe must have started in an incredibly low entropy state. Which cannot be explained on the basis of the known laws of."
},
{
"end_time": 2903.114,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2876.442,
"text": " This is what Richard Feynman said about when was it 50 years ago or something, certainly 40, 50 years ago. He said to understand why we haven't got maximal entropy. Now, the only way to explain that is to add to the known laws, the assumption that in the past, there was a very special state of low entropy. And that's now been called the past hypothesis."
},
{
"end_time": 2925.896,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2903.473,
"text": " and people struggle to find out what it was like well i think this is i think this is this my conjecture now is that is completely and utterly wrong it's because entropy does not apply to the universe it's just naive extrapolation from what is perfectly true in a box"
},
{
"end_time": 2956.305,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2926.544,
"text": " Now because all around us we can find ice, we can make ice in a refrigerator, we can put ice in the corner of a box and it will melt and then evaporate and then you will get what's called heat death. So already back in 1854, four years after the laws of thermodynamics were discovered, Helmholtz in Germany talked about the heat death of the universe. Everywhere, everything will be uniform and there will be no life heat death."
},
{
"end_time": 2969.189,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2956.869,
"text": " This has been a horrendous sort of nightmare for the universe, but it could be just a complete fundamental mistake in thinking that what happens in a box"
},
{
"end_time": 2995.623,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2969.855,
"text": " Is a true model of what happens in the whole universe this is what my book the janus part is about in the paper that with my two collaborators tim koslowski and flavia mccarty we published eleven years ago it was in physical review letters when you mention that physics happens in a box are you referring to a closed system yes well this the danger with that word closed is are there"
},
{
"end_time": 3012.5,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2996.203,
"text": " In dynamics people mean by that but there are no forces acting on the system in addition to the system you're thinking about. They're not meaning by that whether it's in a box or not so close system normally justice assumption that."
},
{
"end_time": 3039.224,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3012.654,
"text": " So you've got a hundred particles and they've got forces that act on each other, but there aren't other particles far away that are also exerting forces. So that word closed is a bit dangerous. I would prefer to say confined if I want to rather than closed. The reason I was asking about that is that there are studies in physics of open systems and there have been for decades, no?"
},
{
"end_time": 3070.674,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3040.674,
"text": " by open systems what they mean is systems that interact with a thermal bath so basically what they so you can have you could have say particles kept within a membrane and but there are particles outside in what's called a thermal bath and and so heat heat and energy can pass between the exterior and that's what they mean by an open system"
},
{
"end_time": 3098.234,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3072.5,
"text": " They don't mean, so I'm meaning something quite different when I'm in the Newtonian end body problem. If you in the simplest case of three particles in Newtonian terms, those three particles, if the energy and the angular momentum are exactly zero, then what all always happens in both directions of Newtonian time, you will always finish up with two particles going around each other."
},
{
"end_time": 3125.572,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3098.643,
"text": " forming a clock a rod and and a compass direction because of the way they behave and the third particle is going away in the other direction and that system the Newtonian size grows to infinity and that's what I call and that's not a confined system that's the one that I that's the one where we found an alternative"
},
{
"end_time": 3152.927,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3127.005,
"text": " arrow of time which is nothing whatever to do with the entropy or the system in the box and it's precisely if we go back to page one it's precisely that quantity on on the expression on page one that i call the variety so those are the a b and c those are the lengths of the sides of the triangle and that quantity is scale invariant"
},
{
"end_time": 3180.452,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3154.343,
"text": " But as the ratios of the sides change, that increases. That expression, just if it's just the three, you've got three particles and their separations between the pairs are A, B, and C, that quantity will start off. In fact, I think it's one over the square root of three when you do the calculation. That's the minimum value it can have."
},
{
"end_time": 3206.51,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3180.964,
"text": " As an equilateral triangle and then as it gets more and more pointed that quantity would increase not steadily but with fluctuations but it will go on increasing upwards and that defines an hour of time and I think that is much more likely to be what is really determining the direction of time in the universe as a whole than anything to do with entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 3232.415,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3206.971,
"text": " and it's based on three shows and and this is i mean it was recognized i mean the physical review letters they they sent it to five referees because we were saying here we've got a major new thing so they wanted to be sure they got it right and yeah and they then decided on the basis of what the referee said they gave it they gave it an acorn it's a sort of recognition as a special paper and then they"
},
{
"end_time": 3247.585,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3232.824,
"text": " And then they also got a quite a distinguished person in quantum gravity to write comment on it. So, you know, it was recognized as being definitely interesting. Are these A, B and C's and D's and so on, are they allowed to be any real number?"
},
{
"end_time": 3275.725,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3248.643,
"text": " Any real number greater than zero. So you have continuity in that you have a real line. Yes. So, so what I have, so in my minimal ontology, the minimum sort of assumptions I make about the universe is that there are points and you can say they're particles because they, but they have zero size. Very important. And this is the particles have zero size that enables you to define scale invariance very precisely. And then, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3305.862,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3276.152,
"text": " And then those ratios of the separations can change and they can go from the most uniform distribution that can have that's it's always a positive definite quantity so it's positive and it's always greater than zero and the absolute minimum is very very uniform but except for three or four particles where it's the equilateral triangle or the regular tetrahedron in nearly all cases"
},
{
"end_time": 3334.224,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3306.135,
"text": " it's not exactly uniform and you can you can see that it's in page in page three that's that's really what it's that's what it's really like at its absolute minimum for 5000 particles the one on on the it's an incredibly spherical ball and on the right it's an equatorial section through but you see it's uniform but not exactly uniform and that's why that's why structure forms"
},
{
"end_time": 3361.203,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3334.667,
"text": " Totally naturally in the Newtonian theory in the Newtonian Big Bang but they have such struggles with it in cosmology because because it's based on everything in general relativity is based on averaging things out and having continuous distributions of not of separations between particles but continuous distributions of fields"
},
{
"end_time": 3388.865,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3361.613,
"text": " And that's that's where all the problem comes from in general relativity. Is there a reason that you say that the size is zero instead of saying that the size is ill defined or not unique? Well, the size is in if you imagine that there's a ruler outside the universe, then you can say the size is zero. That that's where on page one, that's where the quantity in under the square root can become zero."
},
{
"end_time": 3410.64,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3389.428,
"text": " But really if you say so one of my joke to my children i say when i'm when i'm buried on my gravestone inscribed nothing but ratios that that's the it's amazing how that is forgotten i mean it's."
},
{
"end_time": 3440.623,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3411.135,
"text": " Let me point out, it's forgotten by Einstein in his general theory of relativity because the key quantities that define his theory are proper time and proper distance. They are not ratios. So his theory does not rest on secure foundations. I'm not saying that it's, but it needs certainly sorting out the foundations of general relativity need to be properly clarified. And in fact, my"
},
{
"end_time": 3457.995,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3441.254,
"text": " My collaborator Tim Koslovsky has gone a long way. I think in really putting general relativity in the shape it should be on much more secure foundations. They don't rest on this imaginary rule of an imaginary clock outside the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 3480.657,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3458.916,
"text": " Okay, let's talk about Newton. We'll get to Einstein. In our last conversation, I recall you said something about how Newton's gravity was inherently driving the universe towards states of increasing structural complexity and order. And you measure this with that scale invariant complexity, which I believe now is called variety. That's what I'm for. That's because I'm now coming back to my"
},
{
"end_time": 3498.251,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3481.527,
"text": " think that that's the most uh well first of all complex we had we were calling it complexity for a long time but the problem with complexity everybody uses that word in many different senses and quite often it's not well defined we at least had a very well defined notion of complexity but now"
},
{
"end_time": 3516.613,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3498.814,
"text": " I'm not calling it variety in a tribute to live that's because it was still live and it's that i was was thinking but i mean once i read live minutes back in nineteen seventy seven i was looking out for quantity to characterize variety and then it was."
},
{
"end_time": 3544.531,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3517.858,
"text": " It was in 2011 I realized that it was actually the Newton gravitational potential made scale invariant and this is actually so that second quantity on page one in the in the round brackets if you change the sign of that that's the Newton gravitational potential made scale invariant by the quantity which measures its size. Now how would you accommodate gauge fields relationally?"
},
{
"end_time": 3573.353,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3547.227,
"text": " Well they have internal degrees of freedom but in fact actually in a way I would say the first what ought to have been discovered as the first gauge field is actually what my Italian collaborator Bruno Bartotti and I did in 1982 in our paper there."
},
{
"end_time": 3596.459,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3575.879,
"text": " That isn't a non-abelian gauge. The simplest non-abelian gauge theory is the three-body problem. That's because in rotations, when you have rotations, they do not commute. If you"
},
{
"end_time": 3626.305,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3596.817,
"text": " If you have one rotation A and another rotation B, the effect of AB doing A first and then B is not the same as doing B first and then A, you get a different result. So that's an example of non-commutativity. Non-commutativity is right at the heart of quantum mechanics as it's formulated at the moment. So what Bertotti and I showed in 1982 is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3653.404,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3627.108,
"text": " You that the Newtonian. And body problem for arbitrary number of particles, three or more. If the energy is exactly if the angular momentum is exactly zero, that is technically a non abelian gauge theory. Well, wait, just because you have something that doesn't commute, what makes it a non abelian gauge theory? It just makes it non abelian."
},
{
"end_time": 3670.503,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3655.128,
"text": " Because what really now you're getting into something that i call best matching which is what really is underlying gauge theory so if i have."
},
{
"end_time": 3697.295,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3671.442,
"text": " If I have two I don't have I got my I don't think I've got my trials now with which I have the trusty diorama but if I have to I'll have to just imagine that my two hands are two triangles that are not the same size and not exactly the same shape but I put one on top of the other"
},
{
"end_time": 3728.234,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3698.882,
"text": " until i and i rotate them around until i get the difference to be absolutely minimum but i also divide by quantity so that i'm only talking about the shape so uh that's what i call best matching so if i if i don't worry about the overall size but just the shape so if sorry the the the the if i leave this the the size as they are so i've got two triangles"
},
{
"end_time": 3754.309,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3728.626,
"text": " that are more or less the same size but they're not exactly the same so i put one on top of the other and i give each vertex the name one two or three i number them one two or three then as i put them in in any i put them in any position and then i will find that particle one has moved a certain distance so i take the mass of particle one"
},
{
"end_time": 3784.65,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3754.855,
"text": " And the distance is, I've square that distance and multiply it by its mass. I do the same for particle two and the same for particle three. So then I've got a quantity which measures how they have not been brought to perfect overlap or the closest overlap you can get. But as I rotate one relative to the other, that quantity is positive. There must come just one precise position where that quantity is minimized. And that quantity, I say in that situation, I say the two"
},
{
"end_time": 3809.548,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3785.162,
"text": " Triangles are best matched and the quantity is the best match thing and that is actually what is going on in in all of gauge theory in in more complicated situations than just with triangles but and that by the way is also what's underlies what's going on in general relativity but in a much more sophisticated form it's it's really just"
},
{
"end_time": 3826.374,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3810.094,
"text": " Best matching as you go to the limit where the distance it's all expressed with what are called what are they called lead derivatives and things like that but the"
},
{
"end_time": 3851.118,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3826.954,
"text": " In its absolutely simplest form it is what i call best matching that concept of best matching is no no you can find it cited every now and then in the literature people are recognizing that that's that is what's good and it's again something that you can visualize very very easily and so that that's actually what is underlying"
},
{
"end_time": 3878.029,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3851.852,
"text": " Gauge theory and the simplest example is just with a triangle with three particles and in that case you get three particles whose angular momentum is exactly zero. So that's the condition that comes out of a gauge of a non-abelian gauge. It's the simplest non-abelian gauge theory. But all of the gauge theory is just that writ much larger."
},
{
"end_time": 3904.65,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3879.002,
"text": " And so is general relativity in in some of its key aspects. So I want to get to this whole quantum without quantum, because when people say something without something like John Verbeke is a philosopher, he says he wants a religion without religion. I always wonder like, what are you referring to? Because if my wife asked me to clean up, I could say, yeah, no, I'm doing the dishes without doing the dishes. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.07,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3905.384,
"text": " So to justify that usage, what is quantum without quantum? What's being saved and what is the first quantum referring to that's different than the second quantum? Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California and for delivery. What I'm suggesting is that the"
},
{
"end_time": 3956.783,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3935.213,
"text": " All the evidence on which quantum mechanics is based, can in principle be explained in a completely different way without any wave function and without any Planck's constant. That is the, if you like, the outrageous claim I'm making. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 3985.725,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3957.398,
"text": " What I certainly can do, I think I can make a pretty plausible case that there could be a completely different explanation going on. So let's go back to the evidence on which quantum mechanics was based and what the founding fathers were trying to do from about 1925 through to about 1933 when the result was there."
},
{
"end_time": 4009.275,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3986.288,
"text": " So what they were trying to do almost, it was a huge role, was explain the structure of photographs taken in the laboratory. They were photographs of cloud chambers. So cloud, it's a wonderful story of how the cloud chamber was invented by, Wilson was the man who did it."
},
{
"end_time": 4039.701,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4009.957,
"text": " And then he, he, he was trying to imitate, make clouds, things like clouds. And that was a cloud shape. And suddenly he saw these curve tracks. He saw these tracks in this thing when he, when he, uh, it was in the meta stable state. Uh, and, and he, he, he did the thing which made it then form all these vapor bubbles. And suddenly in the vapor bubbles, he saw all these tracks. That was the discovery of cosmic rays."
},
{
"end_time": 4069.735,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4040.282,
"text": " But then the great mystery that they were trying to understand it when they were talking about the foundations of quantum mechanics was to explain the structure of photographs taken in a laboratory. That's and in fact, all of all of the evidence for quantum mechanics. So I did actually, I once did some practical work in astrophysics, which was to measure the"
},
{
"end_time": 4093.677,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4070.52,
"text": " The spectral lines in the spectrum of a variable star and what I was looking at through a microscope was it was a photographic emulsion what I was looking at and as I went along it was where there was a double, where there were two spectral lines close to each other, a doublet."
},
{
"end_time": 4123.285,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4094.275,
"text": " And as you went along, it just got darker and darker. And then there was a place where it was darkest. That was the center of the spectral line. Then it went down again and then it got darker again. So that was a photograph. I was I was measuring the intent, the darkness in the photograph. So all the and that's so. That then was expressed in terms that was the raw data. I call that the raw data."
},
{
"end_time": 4150.811,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4123.865,
"text": " The evidence in the photographs, but then that was then processed data became interpreted in terms of frequencies and wavelengths. But when think about Newton, for example, when Newton saw the colors of the spectrum on the wooden paneling in his, his room in Cambridge. The structure of the molecules in his retina."
},
{
"end_time": 4176.971,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4151.34,
"text": " What correlated with very subtle changes in the chemical composition on the surface of the world. That's what was there. It was another was over a century before those that was then formalized as wavelengths and frequencies. So quantum mechanics in that form was based on"
},
{
"end_time": 4206.271,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4177.551,
"text": " Not on raw data but on on process data as i like to say process food is not good for us so i think process data is bad for theorizing so the. No this is a completely different explanation possible for. Those."
},
{
"end_time": 4237.056,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4207.108,
"text": " cloud chamber photographs that wilson obtained okay suppose that at the instant at which that happens some deity could take a snapshot of the whole universe and that universe satisfies just one condition that quantity that i call the variety has a particular value"
},
{
"end_time": 4264.582,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4238.558,
"text": " So suppose we have a universe with a trillion particles in it. Now there's a huge number of shapes that will all have the same value of the variety that can all have the same value of the variety. So right. So there, so the, the deity takes snapshots of all of them. And then he looks carefully through all of them. And then in one of them,"
},
{
"end_time": 4293.575,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4266.032,
"text": " he finds in a tiny part of it is exactly the laboratory where the photograph is taken and the photograph itself. It's sitting there and the explanation is just determined by the statistics. There are probabilities of shapes and the explanation for why that"
},
{
"end_time": 4320.418,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4294.753,
"text": " photograph is and the laboratory is in part of just one of those shapes is statistical and the fact that the variety has a particular value that is an explanation in principle now this brings in the difference between holism and reductionism the whole of physics"
},
{
"end_time": 4349.838,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4321.647,
"text": " Certainly since Newton, but before that has been reductionist. All the variety has been washed away. Newton got rid of all the variety in his absolute space. And so what was left for these? It's very interesting to read the 1927 Solvay Conference when all the great founders of quantum mechanics got together and discussed its foundations."
},
{
"end_time": 4376.323,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4350.418,
"text": " They were all thinking very in very reductionist terms. The furthest they would think about things would be what could happen in a bar tree. They weren't thinking about what the effect of the whole universe might have. But that's very critical what the effect of the whole universe could be. Dirac had his large number hypothesis."
},
{
"end_time": 4406.852,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4377.108,
"text": " Yes, but he didn't manage to go anywhere with it. But in fact, this is the sort of thing that is that is coming out of these ideas that we're developing. So let's just look at the let's let's look on page one on that extraordinary rich filamentary structure there on the right. What are we looking at exactly?"
},
{
"end_time": 4436.613,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4407.159,
"text": " What was it that created these images? That is just one. It's. It's a distribution of the particles that has a value of the variety, which is what is said to be critical. It's it's either a local minimum or a saddle. So so the value of it's it's a it's a value of the"
},
{
"end_time": 4466.186,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4437.022,
"text": " variety, which if you change any of the particle separations by just a small amount, the variety doesn't change. That's a critical value. And that's the condition that has generated that thing. Okay, let me see if I got this correct. So if we were to pick a variety number, remember the equation is above, let's say we picked variety 110. So there are a variety of different ABCs that you can put in there to get you the number 110."
},
{
"end_time": 4495.486,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4466.954,
"text": " Now, if you look at these different numbers, maybe there's, I don't know how many of them, a trillion different numbers that can get you 110 depending on the amount of particles. If you look at it from a God's eye point of view and you take all the snapshots of what can be 110 and then you say, okay, if I was to vary this, would that change my variety by much? Oh, this changes my variety a great deal. Let me go to the next one. And you keep doing that until you get to one that changes the variety the least."
},
{
"end_time": 4508.933,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4496.049,
"text": " You're looking at that right here? Yes, that's going to be the complete. It's not just one part. If you so if in that one with all those filaments on the right on page one."
},
{
"end_time": 4537.705,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4509.445,
"text": " If you move any of the particles by a small amount, you won't change the variety. It will say essentially exactly the same. All of them can be changed by any one of them can be changed by a small amount without changing the variety. That's what has generated that particular structure. And by the way, there's a huge number like that. You know what factorial means. So essentially the number of ones like that"
},
{
"end_time": 4551.903,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4538.37,
"text": " is a thousand times 999 times 900 all the way down to one it's just an incredible number of them it's incredibly creative this this quantitative variety."
},
{
"end_time": 4580.725,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4552.517,
"text": " But but why don't we why don't we briefly turn over the page because it's quite striking. So on page two, let's go to page two. Before we move on to page two, what was the point of showing this? Like what were you trying to convey on page one? Oh, yes, that's it. Yes, because there's a marvelous statistical act. Do you see if you could look at it with a with a bit of a magnifying glass, but you can see it with the eye already."
},
{
"end_time": 4608.063,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4581.152,
"text": " All the smallest separations are almost identical. You can't you won't find anywhere where two particles are very much closer to each other than the others and that's exactly do you that's because if you go up and look at the expression for the variety it's one over a plus one over b plus one over c so if any of those a b or c goes to zero then one over that quantity goes to infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 4637.654,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4609.138,
"text": " So and if you're fixing if you're fixing the value of the complexity. That's you can't do that because you'll you'll you'll overshoot. So the explanation so you will find it's incredible all of those smaller separations are incredibly nearly equal the smallest ones and that is a holistic explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 4644.753,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4637.995,
"text": " And by the way, it does exactly what the Pauli exclusion principle does in quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 4672.944,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4646.578,
"text": " The reason a friend of mine Harvey Brown makes this very very clear if if it wasn't in according to quantum mechanics if it wasn't for the Pauli exclusion principle if I just put my two hands together like that there should be the effect of a hydrogen bomb going off but it doesn't and that's because you can't in in terms of position you can't get two particles getting close to each other it stops them doing that"
},
{
"end_time": 4703.183,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4673.336,
"text": " but this is just this is one of the reasons why i conjecture that there is no quantum at all because it's all just uh saying if i specify just one value of the variety and i've got to go through all values of if i'm going to start from from the lowest value and let the variety go on up making creating ever more different structures and we'll look at that in a moment um i've got to fix each"
},
{
"end_time": 4732.654,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4703.592,
"text": " so i call that actually the i call that the age of of the shape so the age is zero when it is at absolute minimum and the age is is is slightly greater when it's above the minimum so the the difference between the variety at the value you've got and the absolute minimum could we have we call that the age of the shape that's my collaborator tim koslovsky and i and that's really if you think about it how do you"
},
{
"end_time": 4764.087,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4734.343,
"text": " recognize how old things are well i mean just looking at you and me it's blindingly obvious i'm older than you so this is but everywhere we look we see with a glance we can say some things are older than others there's a there's a walnut tree out in front of the window where i'm looking at well if there was a small walnut tree next to it it was obvious would it be obvious which is the older one"
},
{
"end_time": 4791.476,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4764.462,
"text": " And it's everywhere we look we see but also in stars stars are clearly some stars are much younger than others and those are the ones where they've only got hydrogen and helium in but as they get older there's more helium relative to hydrogen and then other nuclei come in as well. So everywhere in the universe we can see first of all the universe gets older"
},
{
"end_time": 4808.712,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4792.346,
"text": " that's measured by its variety and then within it there's lots of substructures which also have their own relative ages relative to the whole of the universe so this is a quite different concrete way of thinking about"
},
{
"end_time": 4828.951,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4809.94,
"text": " The universe and getting rid of time and replacing it by age i'm going to quote shakespeare now because i wrote an essay called the nature of time and then it is that shakespeare did not attempt to say what time is what the effect of time is and i quote."
},
{
"end_time": 4853.49,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4829.582,
"text": " His the start of his second sonnet when forty winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauties field. The effect of time is to make the wrinkles in my face. That's that's the effect of time. That is that's the measure of age."
},
{
"end_time": 4875.367,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4854.735,
"text": " and we should we should think of so so reductionism so so newton has not got an awful lot to answer for newton said time flows equably without relation to anything external well i mean he's just washed away all variety but the evidence for time is in in structure"
},
{
"end_time": 4903.166,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4876.084,
"text": " Would this be a prediction against the heat death of the universe? Oh, absolutely. Yes. No, but if I'm right, it'll just go on getting more varied forever, ever richer structure. And it has been doing that up to now. How do you do that without contradicting the second law? That the second law applies to systems in a box. If the universe is not in a box, all bets are off."
},
{
"end_time": 4931.8,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4904.36,
"text": " Now, if the universe is open, what is it open to? Well, first of all, if you remember what I said, it's got to be on my gravestone, nothing but ratios. And if it's three particles, if it's a universe of three particles, all it means is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4961.135,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4932.176,
"text": " One of the separations can get infinitesimally small compared with the distant. So you've got two particles here and one out there and all getting larger just means that the ratio of when you divide the long set the two long separations by the short one that just goes to infinity. That's what that's what an open universe is that is a universe that can go expand forever but it's a ratio nothing but ratios."
},
{
"end_time": 4985.026,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4962.159,
"text": " Okay, so would you say the ratios are what are fundamental or the particles that create the ratios? It seems to me like the ratios are defined in terms of the particles. Well, yeah, I would say you need both. You need both. I mean, you've got to have the particles. And then what counts is the ratios of the separations between them."
},
{
"end_time": 5008.643,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4985.896,
"text": " My understanding is that you're using this to get certain features of physics like the born density or spin or fermions and poly exclusion as you mentioned. It seems like a toy universe that you're just toying with. Are you suggesting that this is what the universe is fundamentally? If I'm right, that is what it is fundamentally. In other words, it sounds like you're saying there is no box."
},
{
"end_time": 5022.619,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5008.933,
"text": " There are no fields. Maybe there is no absolute space. There is no so and so there is none of this. There must be a yes somewhere like some ontological fundamental quantity or object. So what is fundamental in your theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 5052.773,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5023.302,
"text": " Hi, everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like minded pilgrimers. By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here."
},
{
"end_time": 5075.691,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5052.773,
"text": " Hit subscribe and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJayMongol dot org. What is fundamental in your theory? I cannot do my theory without assuming. I think they could just even be mathematical points. You didn't call them."
},
{
"end_time": 5094.053,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5076.493,
"text": " Particles that points because they have zero size but there are non vanishing distances between them but the ones it's not the distances. The distance is a so to speak there to enable you then to form ratios of distances the things that are really real."
},
{
"end_time": 5121.766,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5094.462,
"text": " Ontological other ratios of the distances between points that's my absolute minimum that i can do and i'm certain i can already build an extraordinarily interesting universe with just that and nothing else but to really get all the effects of the different types of forces i will need something a more generalized form of the variety that one that is so"
},
{
"end_time": 5130.299,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5122.21,
"text": " simple there that's the simplest one you can possibly but it's extraordinary how much already comes out of that and and it's just"
},
{
"end_time": 5161.067,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5131.067,
"text": " It's the season for all your holiday favorites. Like a very Jonas Christmas movie. And Home Alone on Disney Plus. Should I burn down the joint? I don't think so. Then Hulu has National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We're all in for a very big Christmas treat. All of these and more streaming this holiday season. And right now, save big with our special Black Friday offer. Bundle Disney Plus and Hulu for just $4.99 a month for one year. Savings compared to current regular monthly price. Ends 12-1. Offer for ad-supported Disney Plus Hulu bundle only. Then $12.99 a month or then current regular monthly price. 18 Plus terms apply."
},
{
"end_time": 5189.428,
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"start_time": 5161.067,
"text": " People just don't know about it. What about the number of points? Well, I've now got a way of doing that with infinitely many points. So an infinite Euclidean space with infinitely many points in, and there are different ages of that universe. At its age zero, if you take"
},
{
"end_time": 5214.787,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5190.794,
"text": " Any large region containing say a trillion particles, the distribution will be very, very uniform. A little bit later when the age is a bit greater and you take a large number, it'll look like the one on the right. But I tell you what, let's just briefly go on to page two because it's very interesting to see the effect of this"
},
{
"end_time": 5241.732,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5215.299,
"text": " A colleague of mine, Hemant Shukla, did this for me. This is 12 of these shapes of 100 particles each arranged in order of age. Age zero is top left, as you see, very uniform. And then the variety between the one top left and the next one along. I've said that's the unit of age. And then they're ordered in age."
},
{
"end_time": 5268.387,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5242.244,
"text": " And look how structure forms, very uniform. Here you see, this is why I think we may have stumbled on the nature of creation. Just look as that structure increases as you go from age zero through to 4.6 bottom right. So you start getting these filaments and you notice the filaments all have the smallest separations"
},
{
"end_time": 5294.735,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5268.695,
"text": " pretty much the same then in that age 1.1 you've suddenly got something which looks like a pair of scissors two circles have appeared and then look particularly one that I really particularly like is age 3.2 bottom left there's two perfect filaments and then a near perfect circle and this is in"
},
{
"end_time": 5322.517,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5295.179,
"text": " two dimensions that's why the separations gets slightly larger as you go out to the edges that wouldn't happen in three dimensions you have filaments in three dimensions by the way there is um she's working on it now with a supercomputer in lisbon maria lorenzo who started working on these ideas she's doing a masters and and she's actually she's already found"
},
{
"end_time": 5352.739,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5323.677,
"text": " These are some delightful photos or mock-ups or what have you. What is it supposed to be? Are you supposed to be showing this is galactic formation? This is how life emerges. This is what's going on in your brain. Like what are we supposed to infer from this?"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.954,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5352.978,
"text": " Well, I would say it's paradigmatic of all of those. I would say the, what is the most fundamental aspect of our existence? It's the huge range of shapes of things that we see around us. If you go back to the ancient atomists,"
},
{
"end_time": 5402.841,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5377.193,
"text": " I've read, I got halfway through it, it's a long poem by Lucretius on the nature of things, 150 BC or something, I think he wrote it around then. And you see what he was really interested in was the explanation of the shapes of things. And he talks and to explain that"
},
{
"end_time": 5421.254,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5403.404,
"text": " You have all these remarkable shapes i mean children look like their parents all oak trees have the same sort of structure and things like that and to explain that he introduces atoms equals the primordial seeds which have shapes and different sizes and each."
},
{
"end_time": 5446.186,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5421.578,
"text": " macroscopic thing he wants to explain invokes a new primordial seed with the appropriate shape and size to explain it but this just shows early on what really fascinated people was the different shapes you see around us so if you think about it that is actually the most fundamental feature of our experience the huge variety of shapes"
},
{
"end_time": 5473.285,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5446.561,
"text": " I mean, if people are watching this and can see both of us at once when it's shown, they'll just see that you look pretty different from me. You've still got a good head of hair and so forth. I mean, just look going around at the different amount of structure that there is. That is what should be explained. But and what we've stumbled on"
},
{
"end_time": 5503.712,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5475.947,
"text": " Way of explaining shapes and you see it and it's all done with this one quantity. The simplest form of variety already does extraordinarily well. As you see it going through this 12 ages, 12 ages of man, 12 possible shapes of a hundred particle universe in two dimensions. But already there, it's pretty interesting. Look, look at it. And each one of those."
},
{
"end_time": 5530.93,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5504.582,
"text": " What would you say to someone who says if this is the case that we're just increasing in variety and life is evidence of this variety or life should emerge then why is life only on earth? Why don't we observe much more of an abundance of life? Wouldn't this predict that life should be far more abundant than observed?"
},
{
"end_time": 5560.077,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5532.585,
"text": " I think this could be, um, I don't think Maria in Lisbon is going to be able to do the numerical calculations that would show this, but the, I mean, what one can anticipate at the moment, all the calculations have so far been done show what the variety is like."
},
{
"end_time": 5589.172,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5560.708,
"text": " Very close to its absolute minimum. I would think that if the variety gets much larger, what will happen? Well, it's intuitively clear it will. You will form lots of clumps, lots of clumps of things. And it will be like the first stars forming. And we know that within the stars, there are hydrogen and helium nuclei."
},
{
"end_time": 5614.582,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5590.162,
"text": " These are pretty well the simplest structures you could have. So I would think that when the complex, when the variety is really got a large value, what you will find typically is things that look like stars and then the stars will form, will gather together in what look like galaxies."
},
{
"end_time": 5641.766,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5615.06,
"text": " And within the stars you will just have very simple structures so the simplest so what are molecules if you just think about do you remember these sort of dumbbell images you have of molecules with sort of connecting things like that those are basically relatively simple shapes each of those considered by themselves will have a low value of their variety so a star will"
},
{
"end_time": 5671.323,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5642.739,
"text": " Basically, it's nuclear various complex structural complexity. So there won't be any really individual rich structures within a style. They'll just it'll just be full of lots of things that look much the much the same and quite interesting structured. Now, the only place where"
},
{
"end_time": 5700.572,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5672.176,
"text": " In the solar system where we know there is interesting life is on the surface of the earth and it's I think you could show that these ideas will predict that very special complex structures will only emerge in very special places. I mean within the solar system there's a lot of speculation"
},
{
"end_time": 5724.565,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5701.186,
"text": " um that there could be life of some form in in the satellites of saturn and jupiter in the liquid hanging in their seas whether they would be talking to each other like you and me is another matter i mean one one rather doubts that but um"
},
{
"end_time": 5753.66,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5724.889,
"text": " This seems to be, I mean, I think the widespread view is that very basic forms of matter, of life are likely to form. I mean, after all, we know on the earth that very simple unicellular life developed extremely soon, but then it was a long, long time before it became multicellular and really interesting structures appeared. So my guess is that"
},
{
"end_time": 5783.234,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5754.565,
"text": " It will be a statistical question and depend upon the value of the variety, the age of the age defined by something analogous to what I call the variety that that's where, but there will be sophisticated structures appearing. I mean, if we go back to page one, you can just see how extraordinary the structures are there."
},
{
"end_time": 5805.674,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5783.848,
"text": " Now suppose you had a one electron universe. Do you imagine that there would be multiple points that comprise that universe? Or would it just exist? Well, first of all, I would. Well, they. Well, first of all, you've got to have three particles have an interesting shape."
},
{
"end_time": 5835.742,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5806.169,
"text": " Oh, no, what I meant to say is the electron, if you want to think of the electron as the wave function of the electron, like some people conflate the electron with its wave function, but it doesn't matter. The point is that you have an electron, what we think of as a point particle. Does that correspond to a point particle in your picture or would an electron itself comprise 1000 different points like it would correspond to n equals 1000 here? Oh, no, no, no, I would. I would certainly think I would certainly think of the electron as being just one point."
},
{
"end_time": 5850.845,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5836.408,
"text": " Okay, so then what gives rise to the probabilities like the born density if you don't have a wave function here? Oh, right. Well, let's go on over to... Let's now turn to page four."
},
{
"end_time": 5880.896,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5852.602,
"text": " This is where there are probabilities and brawn densities with how they're being. Interesting. So, you see, this is called the shape sphere. This concept appeared in about 30 years ago. It was formalized in Newton's theory of gravity for when there are three particles. The shape of a triangle is defined by two numbers, two internal angles define the shape of a triangle. So we've got this image here."
},
{
"end_time": 5911.305,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5881.561,
"text": " so because the surface of a sphere is two-dimensional and two numbers define the shape of a triangle you can represent all possible shapes of triangles by points on the surface of a sphere so that's shown here so the the shapes that are mirror images are at the same longitude but opposite latitudes"
},
{
"end_time": 5918.029,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5911.732,
"text": " So there's two equilateral triangles, one at the top and one at the bottom, the North Pole and the South Pole."
},
{
"end_time": 5941.937,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5918.609,
"text": " then there are the degenerate triangles which are really just on a line that's three particles on the line and that's the equator and there are six special points there where they're all in a line and one particle is bang in the middle between the other two but then there are uh situations where two particles are very close to each other and one is on the right so that's where"
},
{
"end_time": 5963.677,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5942.295,
"text": " I think you're seeing it in color aren't you there? That's where two particles are very close to each other compared with the distance to each other and as they get very close to each other that's where the variety becomes infinite, goes up to an infinitely high peak."
},
{
"end_time": 5979.275,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5964.343,
"text": " And then the contours the white lines are contour values of the variety so the variety has its absolute minimum of the equilateral triangle and then it increases and it goes all the way up to infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 6002.722,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5979.787,
"text": " where two particles are that's where it gets deep red and the two particles are very close much closer to each other than the distance to the third and then there's a sad there are three saddles where the value it's like when you go through a mountain pass well you can see that it's image the image is in the in the"
},
{
"end_time": 6032.91,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6003.575,
"text": " The contour lines that I've shown that now the key thing about this, I was talking about mess best matching before that best matching defines a distance, a uniquely defined distance between shapes. It just relies upon points in Euclidean space. So there is a well-defined distance on the surface of that sphere. So the surface of the sphere, it's a pure number. It has the area for pie."
},
{
"end_time": 6056.578,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6034.326,
"text": " now suppose you have a tiny little patch there on that sphere which corresponds to possible shapes of the triangles which are a set of triangles which have nearly the same shape but they're so they can be represented as a little patch of a certain area so let that little patch have the area a"
},
{
"end_time": 6086.493,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6057.329,
"text": " So then the probability it's a probability measure or an existence measure if you like so you divide a by four pi and that tells you the probability that you will have shapes that satisfy the condition that they lie in that point and then very interestingly as you go along one of those contours you can have the same condition you can say i want i'm going to fix the value of the variety"
},
{
"end_time": 6115.094,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6087.193,
"text": " And then I'm going to say, I'm going to mark out the stretches along that contour where no angle is greater than 90 degrees. And then I've got the probability of finding what's the probability of finding triangles that have less than all their angles are less than 90 degrees."
},
{
"end_time": 6143.985,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6116.749,
"text": " And that's mathematically uniquely defined. Just come straight out of Euclidean geometry. And if you say that the contour lines define time or age, I would prefer to call it age, that's analogous to the time in quantum mechanics. It plays the role of time in quantum mechanics. And then you've got probabilities for the shapes at that given time."
},
{
"end_time": 6171.852,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6144.77,
"text": " And that is like a born density. So there is a born density existing. Shapes have a born density without any wave function and without any Planck's constant. Okay. So I see how shapes can have a probability associated with them, but to call them a born density, you'd have to show some correspondence between that and the born density. So have you been able to calculate that? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 6196.323,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6174.172,
"text": " Not if I don't need to do it, because the only evidence that supports quantum mechanics is the outcome of experiments. I mean, if you read Heisenberg on interpreting quantum mechanics, he says we can never know what the wave function is doing or the particles that are being governed by the wave function. All we can see is the outcome of a machine."
},
{
"end_time": 6226.596,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6196.783,
"text": " So if we can reproduce all the results of the measurements in this way, that's all we need. So all the evidence for quantum mechanics is in the Bohr density. The hard evidence. I mean, read John, there's a really wonderful paper by John Bell called Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists. And he just makes the point that, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6253.524,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6226.852,
"text": " the evidence i think he uses the expression it you know you you could say the evidence for quantum mechanics is in a is in a printout on on on paper all right let's go to the last page what are we looking at here oh well this is this is some of this is a very interesting thing so this is what i'm hoping the sort of study so this is intriguing structure that comes this is very typical"
},
{
"end_time": 6281.903,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6254.087,
"text": " This was made for me by Manuel Escuedo who was that Spanish student who found the amazing filamentary structure that we were just looking at and what it turns out you get these filaments and the filaments because it's in two dimensions the filaments the separations get larger as you get to the edge of the disk overall you can see that clearly"
},
{
"end_time": 6309.206,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6282.363,
"text": " But what is what comes every time is that there's a hierarchy. So in the middle, there's the I'm seeing it in black and white, but it's I think it's in red, isn't it? That's right. The long filament, the separations of the shortest ones there. And then you'll see in different colors. I got Manuel to color them according to the length of the separations."
},
{
"end_time": 6339.497,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6310.486,
"text": " And you see there's a hierarchy that comes in every single one that you generate. There's a hierarchy of separations. Well, that sort of smells a little bit of quantum mechanics. It's not understood. As of now, I mean, the experts in Newtonian gravity, and I know, I think I can say I know the top five or six quite well,"
},
{
"end_time": 6363.695,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6339.94,
"text": " They were very struck with that discovery that the Spanish Manuel made and there's no understanding as yet exactly why these particular structures are forming but it's very remarkable that they do. This is a major discovery in Newton's theory of gravity only four years old, I mean centuries after Newton formulated his theory."
},
{
"end_time": 6393.797,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6364.104,
"text": " And why do you get this hierarchy that's going up there? Well, I'm hoping that Maria in Lisbon and perhaps others can can do further tests that will show what what's the cause, you know, provide an explanation for it, but it is quite straight. So this again, you see what should have happened would be to do"
},
{
"end_time": 6424.019,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6394.514,
"text": " I would say this is where you could sort of talk about consciousness that if I had asked Manuel to make the smallest separations with violet color, the next blue and go through the spectrum where the shortest separations, which looks like shortest wavelengths, get violent and then blue and go all the way through to red. So then the ones that are scattered around would be red. Then I would say that. Consciousness is the great gift"
},
{
"end_time": 6453.712,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6424.531,
"text": " um in that it is it is highlighting the structure so it's it first of all there is a structure in the universe it's a mathematical the universe has a mathematical structure but if it was just points with all the same color so to speak just black dots on white paper you wouldn't it wouldn't look nearly so interesting as this done with with the colors there so um"
},
{
"end_time": 6483.268,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6454.172,
"text": " So I think consciousness does two things. First of all, it's enabling us to, well, it makes us aware of anything without consciousness. We would know nothing. But secondly, it's picking out the details in a very wonderful way, but it's also making life very exciting because think about motion. We just recently had the most famous race horse in the world. The grand national was run in this country."
},
{
"end_time": 6503.626,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6483.712,
"text": " A week or two ago i mean nothing is more exciting than the finish of a horse race and everybody gets incredibly excited. But maybe it's really all just photographs and then consciousness is making it appear to us is an incredibly exciting horse race."
},
{
"end_time": 6526.271,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6505.947,
"text": " And giving us, I use the expression, a great gift, the great gift of consciousness, but at the same time, deceiving us monumentally. So I think that the challenge is to see what, how we can explain everything"
},
{
"end_time": 6553.848,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6526.664,
"text": " With the absolute minimal ontology, and I don't think we can go less than points in Euclidean space, but I think virtually everything can be done with ratios of things in Euclidean space. You can have things that are analogous to ratios of charges. I mean, we know that there are color charges and so forth. So I think all of this could be could be built into. I mean, if"
},
{
"end_time": 6570.708,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6554.138,
"text": " If these ideas catch on and people get going lots of people will be exploring with supercomputers what can be done because the calculations I mean a colleague of mine pointed out I said well maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 6599.548,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6571.459,
"text": " Maybe the shapes of molecules will just come out. Here I'm sticking my neck out. I mean, I've said this to distinguished physicists and they've just shaken their head in despair. He's crazy. He's a nice chap, but he's crazy. I mean, quantum mechanics just cannot be used to calculate the shapes of carbon molecules, anything that's a bit complicated. I mean, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 6628.268,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6601.186,
"text": " All sorts of tricks have to be used to say what the shapes are going to be. But the calculations that generate these shapes are really very simple by comparison. I mean, they're not, they're not, they're not differential. They're not really, they're very simple equations. Okay. So let me see if I have a handle on this. So you have violet, you have indigo, you have blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 6657.739,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6628.677,
"text": " Let's look at this image. So the way that the colors are determined is you look at a specific node here. So a specific circle and you say, what is the distance to your closest neighbor? And let's say it's distance is on our screen, 10 pixels. Then you give it red. If it's 20 pixels, you give it orange and so on. Okay. So you have some assignment like that. Then are you saying that consciousness is what takes this set? Like I mentioned, there's red, green, orange, and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 6685.913,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6658.063,
"text": " There's a set of colors here. Consciousness is what does the assignment of the colors to the particles? It assigns the colors in accordance with as the separations go up. And there is this very striking fact that there is always a hierarchy of separations in all of the ones that come out. And I'm saying that that is"
},
{
"end_time": 6693.319,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6687.125,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today."
},
{
"end_time": 6720.452,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6697.398,
"text": " That is how"
},
{
"end_time": 6748.695,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6720.811,
"text": " Color comes into our existence we can't explain why i mean i don't think it will ever be possible to explain why anything exists but what we can do is to describe describe it um there's let me see if i can find it uh have i got there's a nice there's a i read a nice book on consciousness by christoph koch"
},
{
"end_time": 6772.824,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6749.121,
"text": " and he he says what is consciousness he says it's experience what we experience and then he has a nice definition of experience how about can i find it curt here several days later i received an email from julian which i'm going to read"
},
{
"end_time": 6796.032,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6773.609,
"text": " Dear Kurt, I couldn't find the passage in the book The Feeling of Life Itself by Christophe. Having said that consciousness is manifested to us as experience, he says that experience has five distinct and undeniable properties. Each one exists for itself, is structured, informative, integrated, and definite. I liked that as soon as I read it, and it struck me that it bears a close resemblance to my mathematical notion of shape."
},
{
"end_time": 6826.186,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6797.585,
"text": " I would say I would encourage everybody to think about what experience is like and whether, you see, it's not just that motion, all of things like change. I mean, when we listen to music, with the sound change, the quality of the, you know, the frequency of the things that the sound is changing, the speed,"
},
{
"end_time": 6853.166,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6827.073,
"text": " All of that has profoundly influenced the way people trying to understand the world have formed their concepts and maybe it's deceiving them. Let me say another thing. It's very extraordinary with Maxwell and the electromagnetic field."
},
{
"end_time": 6875.401,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6854.241,
"text": " What first of all newton himself was very worried by his theory of gravity because it seemed to allow instantaneous action of the distance and he said himself that this was anyone who was trained in philosophical thinking could that was on the unacceptable hand."
},
{
"end_time": 6901.015,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6875.998,
"text": " I read a very interesting book about the work of Faraday and Maxwell and Faraday did these incredible, marvellous work he did and he discovered various laws and he on a continental trip he'd met Ampere in Paris and they'd become good friends and Ampere using Newtonian type action at a distance"
},
{
"end_time": 6927.142,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6901.527,
"text": " had derived mathematical equations which explained all of faraday's results faraday had been hugely impressed we all know the story of iron filings on a paper above a magnet and they make these patterns and that had led faraday to think of uh what did he call it lx"
},
{
"end_time": 6949.548,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6927.619,
"text": " Electrotonic field or something but anyway had the idea of lines of force and then Maxwell started giving that mathematical form and somewhere Maxwell says Faraday's results can all be explained perfectly well by action at a distance but I do not like action at a distance"
},
{
"end_time": 6978.268,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6950.35,
"text": " so he introduces an electromagnetic field and an ether which can vibrate and fluctuate and the energy is conserved now that's very much if you think about it how much our experience our conscious experience so the aristotle said that there must be a force the force must act to keep anything moving because because of friction if you stop"
},
{
"end_time": 7000.981,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6978.643,
"text": " So then newt managed to show that was wrong with the national motion one something i got moving in his head in his absolute space it would go on forever but. To be changed that required forces and those forces acted over instantaneously over arbitrary distances and newton hated that and maxwell hated that."
},
{
"end_time": 7029.155,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7001.51,
"text": " uh and so they looked for a diff so he looked for different explanation that's what led to the theory of the electromagnetic field well that led to all sorts of of problems within 25 years because of all the problems with explaining black body radiation and there are still that led on to all the mysteries of quantum mechanics now there's another thing before that in 1854 this was 20 years before Riemann before"
},
{
"end_time": 7053.183,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7030.845,
"text": " Maxwell Riemann had developed the theory of arbitrarily curved spaces arbitrary and that then became the theory of general relativity now. All mathematicians are perfectly happy with the idea of differently curved spaces and I think that comes do you"
},
{
"end_time": 7081.169,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7054.838,
"text": " Do you talk about plasticine on the other side of the Atlantic? This stuff with your hands? What is it called? Plasticine? Yeah. So here, look, look at this creature here. This is this is from Beatrix Potter's Johnny Townmouse and Timmy Willie. This is this is Johnny Townmouse that my wife made, molded it with plasticine."
},
{
"end_time": 7103.933,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7081.476,
"text": " Alright this is a shape you can you can you can make it like that and it so this is I think this is why theoretical physicists are perfectly happy with the idea of a curved space so they they start off with flat space and then they have a torus"
},
{
"end_time": 7134.258,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7104.36,
"text": " It's all the things you can form with your hand, with plasticine, and that makes them perfectly happy with this thing. Then the problem starts arising. Which of all these possible spatial structures is the one that's describing the universe? Well, possibly you've just created a monumental problem."
},
{
"end_time": 7163.695,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7134.753,
"text": " Consciousness is misled you into doing that because you've got the idea so so what did remun do he had this idea. Completely against what live net said remun first of all got rid of all variety in the world only left was so to speak the shape of plasticine but without any markings on it at all. Completely featureless but shape without feature without without markings."
},
{
"end_time": 7188.882,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7164.121,
"text": " And then he imagined coordinates on it like stars in the sky but not real stars like you do see in the sky but imagined and then if they're close to each other in terms of infinitesimal distances then he imagined that you've got Euclidean geometry holding locally but I well this it was a huge"
},
{
"end_time": 7205.742,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7189.36,
"text": " Achievement mathematically it's phenomenal that then that turned into geometry that can fair be dynamical in general relativity and seems to work very well. But it may all be a colossal invention."
},
{
"end_time": 7235.52,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7207.073,
"text": " And all come because of our feeling that we can hold plasticine or dough when when I bake bread so I make buns. Maybe just that feeling that consciousness gives us that we can make things of different shape. Leads theoreticians to. Use these forms but then creates all sorts of problems for them I was talking to a collaborator about this and then."
},
{
"end_time": 7258.626,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7236.271,
"text": " Did you know which which which shape of the universe are we going to have the great mathematician. He said. It's why don't we just stick with new tone with with euclidean geometry it is so simple because then he said the."
},
{
"end_time": 7286.647,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7258.968,
"text": " Instruments the measuring things that we use to measure geometrical relationships those are determined by the forces that are acting on the particles in the in the substance in the thing so so the fact that i got a ruler here that ruler has got the shape it has. And it's nice and smooth because of the forces that are holding it together and so maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 7310.998,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7287.688,
"text": " Geometry comes about the actual geometry that we measure and experience is a combination could be a combination of euclidean geometry and then the forces that are acting and then in 1921 Einstein published a paper called Geometry and experience and he gives a very nice description of Pankara's theory and he says"
},
{
"end_time": 7335.862,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7311.869,
"text": " So Spetsae Aeterni and Poincare is correct. Basically he's right, that is correct, but then Einstein was so worried about quantum mechanics and what the real forces were, he says it's too early for us to tell, but maybe he"
},
{
"end_time": 7361.254,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7336.51,
"text": " Maybe nucleotide geometry is all we need. That's what that's what Poincare conjectured. And if you look at those extraordinary structures that in those images I've shown and bear in mind that there are probabilities for shapes that the existence of something like a born density for shapes is rock solid mathematics. I'm not understanding."
},
{
"end_time": 7390.998,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7361.613,
"text": " Are you suggesting that our insistence on locality over non-locality is the problem? That we shouldn't be troubled with action at a distance? I think so because you see what is what is regarded as the greatest miss. I think most people who think about quantum mechanics would say the greatest mystery in quantum mechanics is that entanglement correlations are set up instantaneously between"
},
{
"end_time": 7415.145,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7391.391,
"text": " points in space that are arbitrarily far apart and that's so when when Schrodinger back in 1935 coined expression entanglement in English there was a German word he'd used before but he called it entanglement in English at the end of the second paper he talks about"
},
{
"end_time": 7439.684,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7415.913,
"text": " When these he says it's very well confirmed in quantum mechanics in the laboratory, but the speed of light is not coming into play. But he said, I'm not alone. But if these entanglement correlations can be established, it's effectively instantaneously. I will find that repugnant like other people do."
},
{
"end_time": 7464.753,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7440.964,
"text": " And this is the great mystery. But to confirm that these have been established later on, there must be something like a photograph of a large enough area to show the two places that are correlated all together in a single photograph. So the evidence ultimately is in a photograph. It's in a snapshot."
},
{
"end_time": 7490.794,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7465.35,
"text": " So if you can then explain why that snapshot exists, that there's a high probability for that snapshot, which is a shame. If there's a, then you've explained, you've explained the things. So nobody, nobody finds the existence. So all you take any separate, you take N particles in Euclidean space."
},
{
"end_time": 7514.991,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7491.305,
"text": " there's something like n squared divided by two separations ratios of separations between the two and they're all correlated there's colossal correlation between points in euclidean space nobody nobody thinks that's mysterious because they're so used to euclidean space but maybe that's what's behind"
},
{
"end_time": 7545.162,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7515.503,
"text": " entanglement correlations maybe that's what we call entanglement correlations are just reflections of those correlations it could be as simple as that it's a possibility i'm not saying it's right nothing is is certain but i think it's a challenge it's keeping me happy in my old age how is it you're able to come up with so many ideas at 88 um and also stay excited about physics and math"
},
{
"end_time": 7572.841,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7546.766,
"text": " I guess just I'm a lucky person. You know, I went back right back in 1969, I decided to go independent because I wanted to think about time and motion and things these these fundamental things. And I did this incredibly boring job of translating scientific Russian for 28 years. Yes, good money earning very stable, desperately boring. But then"
},
{
"end_time": 7588.217,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7573.746,
"text": " six years in nineteen seventy four i got my first paper was in nature got. Pretty well received quite publicized by nature and that brought you my wonderful collaborator bruno bertotti in italy we work together for about six years."
},
{
"end_time": 7606.374,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7588.899,
"text": " And then I felt my pension fund was big enough in 1996 so I retired then and I've had now 29 years I've had all to myself and I've had some very very good collaborators I had had a"
},
{
"end_time": 7630.077,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7606.783,
"text": " I was very lucky to meet somebody called Jimmy York who'd done very important work on general relativity and he put me on to working with his Irish, his first PhD student, Neil and Baruch Hu, the Irishman in court. Both of them sadly died recently but I collaborated with the Irishman for about 10 years with other students and then"
},
{
"end_time": 7655.691,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7630.418,
"text": " Tim Koslowski who's now I would say my main collaborator he's he's been working with me on and off now for since 2008 I met him at the perimeter Institute and things are just more and more things are coming the real breakthrough came with this alternative explanation of the arrow of time within Newtonian theory the"
},
{
"end_time": 7679.309,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7656.203,
"text": " The fact that I came up with that was reading Leibniz. It was over 30 years from reading Leibniz to then finding the expression for the variety and finding that it was already sitting inside Newton's theory of gravity and then just more and more ideas came and"
},
{
"end_time": 7699.087,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7680.094,
"text": " The German collaborator was very important. He was the one who, because I was thinking that, because before Manuel had made that remarkable discovery at the observatory in Paris, I had been thinking that"
},
{
"end_time": 7725.247,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7699.445,
"text": " The smallest separations would be why the electron doesn't fall to the nucleus in the atom, but that would be the thing. But when I discussed that with Timmy, he said, no, no, you should think of it in terms of the Pauli exclusion principle, which applies to fermions, which behave in a quite different way from bosons, photons behave in a quite different way. So I'm now suspicious whether there are any photons at all."
},
{
"end_time": 7754.667,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7725.555,
"text": " but that the it's the fermions exist and interesting and that we have an explanation of why they can't all sit on top of each other it's just that at any given value of the complexity because that expression you know go back and shows the expression for the variety on page one it's it's that second factor in the round brackets where the separations one over a plus one over b"
},
{
"end_time": 7782.756,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7754.957,
"text": " so if a goes to zero that immediately becomes infinite so you just it's incredibly so i think this is the exponent this could be if if we're right if tim and i are right this is the explanation for the stability of matter you cannot at a given age of we are at a certain age of the universe that is quite clear i mean the the that i don't think anybody would argue with that the universe is age"
},
{
"end_time": 7811.067,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7783.643,
"text": " and that means that it has a certain value of its variety if you go far enough out you will get a value of the variety because that's again we haven't we haven't even looked at the evidence for that but that's an actually it might be just interesting to look at that that's page i think that was was it page page three yes let's let's look at page three we have looked at that that"
},
{
"end_time": 7835.555,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7812.637,
"text": " There's something incredibly special about. The two factors that define the variety and are in in the Newtonian theory so the fact that you get this incredibly uniform ball of five thousand particles and then on the right that section through it which is very very uniform but not exactly uniform that's."
},
{
"end_time": 7848.422,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7836.186,
"text": " Only possible in three dimensions where you're multiplying a potential which is one overall by quantity which increases as all."
},
{
"end_time": 7877.534,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7848.916,
"text": " So the thing that's under that square root increases as the distance with the distances and the other one goes as inversely as the distance and that scale invariant quantity in three dimensions this is related to Newton's potential theorem. Newton was very proud of this theorem which explains why celestial bodies which are not rotating are perfectly spherical and it's a unique property of"
},
{
"end_time": 7903.677,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7877.875,
"text": " uh three dimensions and that particular combination one upon r multiplied by r making it scale invariant that's pretty impressive so that satisfies the cosmological principle it looks the universe looks the same wherever you are so that's the holy grail of cosmologists but they struggle to get it and and and and and it's all done with this pretty strange"
},
{
"end_time": 7933.353,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7903.916,
"text": " I just spoke to Neil Turok who also is against inflation. That was when Koslovsky and Flavio McCarty, my two main collaborators at the time, were at perimeter when"
},
{
"end_time": 7962.125,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7933.78,
"text": " Neil was the director and he heard me talk about it and he liked in fact he has a paper out recently which apparently cited our work or me I forget exactly I think he may have cited the Janus point but that again I would say maybe theoreticians are looking you where we have this expression to look at gift gift horse in the mouth do you have that in across the other side or maybe we do I haven't heard it"
},
{
"end_time": 7986.135,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7962.551,
"text": " Well it means if you're offered a horse for free and then you say I'm going to first look and see if it's got good teeth then that's thought to be pretty crazy so it's saying looking at a gift horse to check the teeth but you know I just think it's just possible"
},
{
"end_time": 8014.684,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7986.749,
"text": " That the whole story is incredibly much simpler than anybody thinks and that. As I was saying, because you can mold because my wife was able to mold the plasticine into the shape of Timmy Willie, Johnny Townmouse, but it was also Timmy Willis up there too. This this enables."
},
{
"end_time": 8035.367,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8016.886,
"text": " Theoreticians to think that three-dimensional space can come in all these incredible different possibilities. I mean, this was the Poincare conjecture, which wasn't it the Russian who proved it eventually in three dimensions, the most difficult one."
},
{
"end_time": 8065.862,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8035.964,
"text": " Julian,"
},
{
"end_time": 8081.459,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8066.442,
"text": " I'd love to continue to speak with you. I have so many questions. So we'll have to have a part three questions like where does spin come from, which I'm sure you can get to next time. And I know that scale invariance in three dimensions is broken in the standard model because of masses."
},
{
"end_time": 8110.998,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8081.817,
"text": " So I want to know about how your theory accommodates masses as well. You can feel free to comment on this shortly. But anyhow, I want to talk to you about so many more topics and questions. It'll have to wait until next time. If you want to comment on how masses come about, that's fine. But if you want to save that until next time, and we use this as a teaser for people to salivate at, then I would say let's stop now because there's so much work to be done. I would say all that"
},
{
"end_time": 8134.394,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8111.34,
"text": " is established so far is certain really big possibilities have been opened up i think the possibility that there is there just is no quantum mechanics it's just probabilities of shapes has been opened up as a real possibility that consciousness has"
},
{
"end_time": 8151.527,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8135.043,
"text": " Misled us into introducing many more complicated many more possibilities than need be so that's great that's great it worked for the theoreticians to say which one might be realized when in fact the simplest one would have been perfectly good all along."
},
{
"end_time": 8168.319,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8152.039,
"text": " That's all i'll say at the moment um now i'm now 88 whether i'll get much further we'll see but if people start doing it it'll be very interesting to see what maria in lisbon finds with with her analysis with the"
},
{
"end_time": 8198.217,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8169.206,
"text": " With the supercomputer that she's working on now maybe some striking things will come that maybe somebody watching this will come up with some some idea and i'm getting approached to somebody from india is talking to yesterday he's decided to avoid. Going into academia avoid the publish or perish syndrome and he's he's now starting to study all these ideas and show dynamics maybe he'll come up with something you know it's. I think it's."
},
{
"end_time": 8218.746,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8198.712,
"text": " It should be explored. That's the challenge I put out. Is the universe much, much simpler than people have thought? But nevertheless, incredibly rich, thanks to consciousness. Thank you. Well, pleasure talking to you."
},
{
"end_time": 8236.067,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8220.128,
"text": " I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share. And as always, feel free to contact me."
},
{
"end_time": 8263.643,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8236.493,
"text": " New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts?"
},
{
"end_time": 8275.794,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8263.985,
"text": " While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 8300.418,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8278.046,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
},
{
"end_time": 8326.442,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8300.418,
"text": " Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, et cetera, it shows YouTube. Hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 8346.442,
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 8372.619,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8346.442,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think."
},
{
"end_time": 8376.476,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8372.619,
"text": " Either way your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
]
}No transcript available.