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Sir Roger Penrose: 20th Century’s Greatest Living Scientist
September 28, 2024
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It's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. What do consciousness, the measurement problem and black holes have in common? With characteristic boldness, Sir Roger Penrose outlines his controversial views on the collapse of the wave function. The Schrodinger equation. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong.
the role of gravity in quantum mechanics, the principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity, is in conflict with the principle of superposition and his own radical theory of cyclic cosmology. I don't believe in inflation. That is the idea that our universe evolved from a previous universe and gives rise to another forming an ever-repeating cycle.
Penrose doesn't just poke holes in existing theories, he offers ambitious frameworks like twister theory that could potentially unify quantum theory with general relativity. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. This episode was filmed on location at the Math Institute at Oxford, directly after our interview at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. It's a rare in-person glimpse into one of the most influential mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century.
Sir Roger Penrose, it's been a long time coming. I've been a huge fan for I think decades, literally decades. Thank you and welcome. My pleasure. Good meeting you at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. Lots of people don't believe some of them. The arts and ideas, what do you mean? Well, the ideas about cosmology, which I have, which are certainly people have a lot of trouble believing them. Even though we have good evidence,
Is that the torch that you want passed on most, the conformal cyclic cosmology? Well, I have a trouble because there's more than one thing. You see, one of the things is Twister Theory and its progeny. There's been a conference. You see, this is taken seriously in the sense that there has been a conference going on all about Twister Theory, not just a conference, but a whole, I think, term, whole term, I think.
dedicated to the subject of Twister Theory, which is something which I sort of started in 1963, I think it was, and it's had many developments and many offspring, you might say, and it's spread out to have interests in different areas. Now, it's one of the things that I've been working on for most of my life, and I can't explain it without being a little technical.
It's just that... You can feel free to be technical on this podcast. Okay. Which a bit like... Well, Emerson discovered quaternions, which was a way of talking about the geometry of three space. And he introduced this thing called the vector product, which if you have two vectors, well, it's really an algebra of vectors, where you have vectors and scalars mixed together. And if you multiply two vectors,
You have this thing called a cross product, which gives you a third vector. Now, this kind of notion is coming in at a different level with what I call twisters, or now what I call bitwisters. See, the twisters, the subject took ages to develop. As I said, in 1963, when I first had the concept, which, so I gave a talk in Cambridge just recently,
Where I explained the origin of the ideas and there is a certain you might call them slight misconception. There are two different concepts which get confused in Twister theory and these two concepts are positive and negative frequency and positive and negative helicity. And the thing is that the positive negative frequency idea was something that I learned from Engelbert Schucking who was somebody I shared an office with
When I was in a group of people working on general relativity in Syracuse, New York State, in the United States. And there were a lot of people working on relativity theory there. And this is, I think, in 1962. And I learned from Engelbert Schucking two things which I found very interesting. One of them was this question of
what you mean by what's important in quantum field theory and he said the most important thing in quantum field theory is the splitting of field amplitudes into their most positive and negative frequency parts. You keep the positive frequency and you throw away the negative frequency and I thought gosh that's an interesting idea. The other thing he told me was and he told me various things but these were the things of relevance to what I'm saying
The other thing he said was to do with the Maxwell field equations, Maxwell's equations which are very important. They describe electricity, magnetism and light. So it's a theory of light as well as how electric and magnetic fields interrelate to each other. Very beautiful equations which I learned about when I was a graduate student and
I was very keen on the Maxwell equations, especially when you write them in this formalism called two-spinner formalism, which is I can say a bit more about later. But the Maxwell equations, he told me they are conformally invariant, so they only depend on spacetime structure independent of the scaling. So if you magnify the scale up or down, magnify the metric up or down if you like, it makes no difference. That's conformally equivalent.
the conformal maps are ones or the conformal transformations are ones which can change the scale but they don't change the well they don't change the light cones in spectral relativity terms so the speed of light is the same of course light after all the speed of light is the same when you magnify and the change the scale but the map what struck me about this these two facts that i learned from here is there seem to be a little of a
an impasse between the two. I mean, how do you decide what splitting the positive and negative frequency? You look at the individual frequencies, which means you do a Fourier decomposition and you take each individual Fourier component and you split that into its positive and negative parts. That's not conformally invariant. You do a conformal map for rescaling the Fourier decomposition, just not go into itself. And so I thought it would be lovely to have a way of looking at this, which is
They come together and you don't have this sort of impasse between the two. Well, I was aware, I don't know whether I was told or I thought about it myself, I was aware of the fact that if you take the field of complex numbers, fold them up into a sphere, so you've got a point at infinity as well, and you take the real numbers and think of that as the equator. So the real numbers go around the equator and the complex numbers go up and down.
and if you have a function which is defined on the equator which extends into one hemisphere, that's positive frequency, it extends into the other hemisphere, it's negative frequency. This is a completely conformally invariant description. You can formally invariant the sphere and it doesn't change the splitting into two halves. So I wanted a way of doing this but globally for space-time. So for the whole space-time
I wanted it to be somehow that the real spacetime is the boundary between two extensions into the complex. But if you just complexify spacetime, make all your coordinates complex, you get an eight-dimensional space, not a five-dimensional space. That's no good. It doesn't put it into two halves at all. You get a thing called the forward tube, which is a tiny thing at one side.
What was i doing it didn't seem to have any rational reason for looking at this it did seem to me there ought to be a way of exploiting this
Beautiful way in which you do the positive negative frequency without having to look at the Fourier components individually It's a deeper concept if you like and it's also conformally invariant of a scale business that Maxwell theory has you don't lose that Okay, well I had this sort of going around in my mind and didn't know what to do about it It was a rather it was a very unfortunate occasion because I was in Texas in Austin, Texas
And I was working with various colleagues in Austin, Texas. Engelbert Schucking was running this particular meeting. It was a year long meeting where people like Roy Kerr, Ray Sachs were there too. And very distinguished people working in relativity theory. And there were also people in Dallas, Texas. And one of them in particular was somebody I was collaborating on a book. I think I was doing it at that time on spinners.
And this was Wolfgang Grünberg. And Ivor Robinson, who was also, he was somebody who was a very clever fellow, had wonderful ideas. He never wrote anything down. He relied on getting a co-author to write the paper. It was all done with words. He had a wonderful way with words. The Americans loved him because he spoke in this way that they weren't used to, which the words all fitted together in this beautiful way.
Yes, he did have a wonderful way with words. There's no doubt about it. Was he the one that didn't write papers? Yes. Well, he was important in another story, which is a different story with my story, namely the singularity theorem, because that was walking down the streets and crossing the road. That's a different story. It was the same person that was that was Ivo Robinson. Yes. So he obviously was somebody who could take my attention.
but what he had told me about was he'd found some solutions of Maxwell's equations which had a very special character. They're what are called null. They have point in one direction, you see. Usually there you have these two directions which are called principal null directions on the light cone. They're light directions and if they coincide it's what's called null and these are more like radiation fields and he found a beautiful family of solutions
which he constructed in the following strange way. You take a light ray, one light ray, and you take all the light waves which meet it. When I say a light ray, I mean the trajectory of a photon. So in space-time, it's the space-time picture of a photon as thought of as a particle. So now if you think of one light ray and you look at all the light waves which meet it coming in, then you have a family of light rays. And then you construct the solution which is based on those light rays.
Now they have this awkward singularity, which is the light way that they meet. Why is that a singularity? Well, they all start coming together and so they're not, the nature of the solution is different when they come together. Okay, but it's of a different sort of singularity than the singularity theorem. It's not a serious singularity. It's a singularity in the Maxwell. I think things become infinite. I see. I don't remember the details of it. Sure. They just become infinite on that solution. Just because the light rays don't make this nice family anymore, they got crunched up on the other light ray.
But what Ivor Robinson did, he had this clever trick where you just place the light ray into the complex, make it a complex light ray, then you can keep the light waves which meet it. There's a family which is still real. So you can see those real ones, even though the one they meet is in the complex. And they twist around each other in this wonderful configuration.
I thought about this before and I think I knew in detail what this configuration was. It corresponds to what's called Clifford parallels. Clifford parallels are a beautiful geometrical configuration. If you take a three sphere, so that's an ordinary sphere but in four dimensions, so that's a
So it's a three-dimensional surface in four dimensions. So it's a family of points which have the same distance from the origin in four Euclidean dimensions. I'm not talking about spacetime now. That four Euclidean dimensions. So we have a three sphere and there's this beautiful family of circles which fill the whole three sphere. No two of them intersect and they all link each other. It's called Clifford parallels or
It has a name, which is the topological people like better. Well, it's, it's, it's called the fibrations. Right. And, um, it's a sphere's worth of circles. It's a, it's a very nice example of a fiber bundle and how you, you have this diagram that people like to draw where you have the fiber, which is the circle and the bundle, the entire bundle is the sphere.
And the projection down is a two-sphere. So each circle corresponds to a point on the two-dimension, an ordinary two-sphere, an ordinary sphere. So the points, each point corresponds to a circle. So it's a beautiful example of a fiber bundle. It's the most simple and beautiful example you can have in a way. I was well aware of it. I just liked the geometry. I found it was really elegant. And it's the same kind of thing you get with these, except that now you're talking about light rays. So if you think of the light rays
Not sure quite the easiest way to say this is. It's now the circles correspond to each point of the Clifford 3 sphere corresponds to a light ray. And the whole family of them twists around in this complicated way. So I'm familiar with this configuration and that this was a sort of way of thinking about a complex light ray. You push into the complex and you get this real description of it.
which somehow feels out this complex light ray, but only in this real configuration that you can visualize. So I found this very beautiful. Now, is this any use to me? Well, the occasion that I'm talking about here was a particular occasion, which was maybe in a sense the most significant thought which I had had, which was
Well, there was an event, you see, a very unfortunate event, when Kennedy was assassinated. And this was in 1963. And it was in Dallas. And my Dallas colleagues, including Wolfgang Rindler and Ivo Robinson and other people there, Oschwarz, Pitchto Oschwarz was there. And they were at a dinner. And they
Kennedy was supposed to go and give a talk at the dinner and he was awfully late and they sort of joked, well maybe somebody shot him. Somebody had shot him. And they came and it was a way of, someone said they came, it was just about a week later I think when we decided to go to southern Texas to go to a nice place where there was a beach and people could relax and try and recover from this awful occasion. And
and do some math. So we went down there. I didn't think we'd talk much maths. I don't remember. But I remember coming back and most of the people wanted to talk gossip with each other, including my then wife. They really wanted to gossip. I wasn't interested in the gossip. I just wanted some peace. I was the one who was committed, more or less committed to be in the car driven by Piszta Osváth. Now the thing about Piszta Osváth, he was a Hungarian.
who did speak English, but he didn't like to speak even in Hungarian. I think he didn't like speaking. He was a silent person. Okay. He was the Hungarian direct. Yes, but he was definitely, he could speak English with a strong Hungarian accent. Sure. And, uh, he was the driver of the car. Okay. And so this was very nice for me because I didn't have to make up conversation to speak to him. He preferred not to have conversation.
So I think to myself, I knew about this Robinson-Congrens of rays, which sort of describe a light ray, but which has been displaced in this way. And I said, the thing to do is to count, and I thought I didn't say anything, to count the number of degrees of freedom this configuration has. How much freedom does it have? And I counted them and it has six degrees of freedom.
And that's significant because? Yes, this is very significant because light rays themselves have five degrees of freedom. So it's only one. You make your light ray complex in a sense, and you only drop your dimensionality by one. It's not really what you do if you're complex around light. We have five complex dimensions. No, no, this only gives it drops it by one. Why is that so important to me? Because this gives me a picture
The light rays themselves are represented by points on this bound three, sorry, this five dimensional boundary. And the Robinson congruences, as I call them, these these twisting congruences of light rays represent the points. If they go right handed, they're one side. And if they go left handed, they're other side. This is the splitting of the space into two halves. Just what I was looking for. Only it does it globally for the whole of space time.
Don't think of points, think of light rays. And then the complex ones in this strange, contorted sense are only one more dimension. So that was the origin of Twister theory. I went back, got him back much earlier than anybody else because they were still gossiping, I guess. And I went to the, I had a blackboard there and I worked it out in terms of two component spinners.
And it worked beautifully. And this was Twister's. You take two two-component spinners, the way you can think of it, see a two-component spinner ordinarily points along the light cone. It's like a light, it has a null vector associated with it, and that null vector points along the light cone. In addition, there's a little flag plane, and the flag plane tells you its phase. So the length of the, not the length, but the sort of extent of the
The extent of a null vector gives you one scale and the other scale is the phase, which is the little flag plane. So you have this nice geometrical way, apart from the sine, which you have to add in addition, you've got the nice way of describing two component spinors. I was well familiar with that. So the thing about the twisters, as you can think of the light ray, where does it hit the light cone of the origin at some point?
Then you look at the light ray going up that hits that point. That's a thing I called omega. I didn't call it omega at the time, but it's to do with angular momentum, really. It's the moment of the light ray about the origin. And the other is pi. That's the momentum of the photon. So you've got the momentum and the moment. And the two two-component spinors, they give you a four-dimensional entity. This was a twister. So that was the origin of twister theory.
I tried to talk about it to my colleagues there. None of them were interested. Engelbert was. He was the only one that was at all interested in what I'd done. So it was a little bit over. Why weren't they interested? Because it wasn't gender relativity. 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.
I didn't know how to do general relativity with twisters. It took me decades to find out how to do general relativity with twisters. Do you think twisters will be an ingredient in a theory of everything? So something that combines the standard model? It certainly should have a much broader application. But you see what you have to do is take another step, which I sort of made a couple of years ago, made it in a slightly different way.
Well, it was a couple of years ago, yeah, but it was in a slightly different way about six years ago, because I wrote an article then which wasn't published too much later. But the article I wrote more recently was in honor of CN Yang, the great physicist, one of the people who got a Nobel Prize for weak interactions and their chirality, right, light ref, right. I mean, it's quite curious because of that too. You see, you have the chirality. See, when I say it's
The twister has a chirality to it automatically, which is the way it's just described. If you, if you, if you reflect it, it's really goes into something else. It goes into a dual twister. So you have a twister, which is a four complex dimensional space, vector space, if you like, the dual of that space is the opposite twist. So you have a twister and a dual twister and they twist the opposite way, roughly speaking.
But this was all to do with, I was trying to do positive and negative helicity. I learnt not too long after this that you can describe momentum and angular momentum in terms of twisters very nicely. And the null ones, if you're talking about light rays, this is just a twister, basically. It's a twister and a dual twister together. But the nice thing, you can describe the angular momentum. This is the notation I use later to call
Moment and angular momentum thing that's the omega and the momentum is the other one which is the pi part and that's just the splitting which gives you this these two interpretations for the two parts you have two two components windows and they give you these two parts it's also conformally invariant the conformal transformations work beautifully conformal invariance it got more mixed up with
Positive and negative helicity. You see, what you really see is that the twister, the positive and negative, you have the space, which is split into two halves. The space, incidentally, is a well-known space to geometers. It's a complex projective three space. So it's a sixth real dimensional space, which is really complex three dimensional space.
So it's nice to visualize because you just think of it as three dimensions and you say, well, it's really complex, too. So you can visualize lots of things in that. And it's really six real dimensions and the five dimensions go either up or down depending upon what is it that's positive or negative. Well, you look at it was took a lot of time to analyze this. But when you really see its connection with angular momentum and so on, it really is a helicity. So it's to do with the photon is rotating.
So twisters are inherently chiral? They're inherently chiral. So that this was where it was, I talked about helicity, that's what it was at that time, whereas the intention was this should be positive negative frequency. So the whole subject kind of got mired, in my view, with this confusion. And it got particularly so when one started to talk about general relativity
And there were some ideas which came from Ted Newman, who was a close colleague of mine, and he was interested in making space time a little complex and looking at angular momentums, things which come from your displacements to the complex. It was a very deep insight that he had there. And I realized that that was the sort of thing I was doing. And one of his ideas, I won't go into the details. I realized you could take this and talk about them in twister terms.
And this described a kind of twister, which a twister, which actually referred to a curved space time. Okay. Wait, when you say you talked about them in twister terms, what do you mean? Does the complex space time in twister terms? Yes, it is a complex space time. And you see Ted Newman didn't mind about his space time, not being directly physical. I don't know whether he minded or not. He called it H space. He had a space construction, which involved making space time complex.
I'm looking at it in this particular way that he did. So why was that interesting to you? Because when we've talked off air, if I mentioned the word supersymmetry, there's a grimace on your face. Yes. I mentioned string theory because it has extra dimensions and maybe some other flavors. There's an even worse grimace. I can tell you where the grimace comes from. See, all these things are adding extra dimensions to space time.
Now what I was doing was absolutely crucially tied to the space timing having three space and one time dimension. If you change that, you wreck the theory. So some people see a theory that works in n dimensions, especially mathematicians, that's a feature that it can work in any dimension. And if you say my theory only works in four dimension, some people see that as a weakness. You see that as no, that's a strength. Absolutely.
That is absolutely the point. I'm seeing it as a strength because you're not looking at mathematics. Okay. Mathematics did pick up, mathematicians pick up on twisted theory and they generalize it to higher dimensions and all sorts of things. Fine. That's good. That's good stuff, but it's pure mathematics. I'm interested here in specifically the mathematics, which applies to the physical world. Now that whether you can generalize that to 17 dimensions is of no particular interest to me. And if people do string theory,
Initially, when I heard about string theory, I thought it was a beautiful idea. And then when it went and said, oh, no, it only works in, I think, 26 dimensions originally, I thought, okay, that's not okay. You can work on that. I'm not going to work on that. It's not physics anymore. So you mentioned C and Yang, you mentioned fiber bundles and implicitly hopfibrations. Those are differential geometric ideas. And the standard model and general relativity are based in differential geometry. Yeah.
Standard model is not even differential geometry, it's really flat space time really. Do you see differential geometry as what will be the language of physics in the next few decades or do you think you started off in algebraic geometry? Do you see algebraic as the chopped liver that should be? You're talking about my shady history here. Now it is true that when I went to Cambridge... I'm going to ask about growth in Deakson. Don't, but you can if you like.
But all I'm saying, yes, you see, when I was in Cambridge doing algebra geometry, I was trying to solve a problem that my supervisor, William Hodge, suggested. He had given a list of problems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, you can work on any of these. And I didn't understand any of them. Oh, the bottom one I can understand. Yeah, I'll try that one.
I think suspect it was the one that he was least interested in. I'm not sure. I think he was quite interested in it, but it was not part of the march of algebraic geometry and what my close colleague at that time, Michael Atiyah, would have been doing. He was the real expert on these things. I mean, all these things are driven by anecdotes, I'm afraid. Hodge suggested at one time, there were various people in my group,
And for one reason or another, I didn't connect with what I was doing. But he suggested, well, maybe not so keen, Hodges suggesting, maybe you're not so keen on the subject. I was expressing some disappointment with it. I think it's OK. But maybe you prefer to work on one of the other topics. You might like to sit in on one of the other graduate students sitting on. So I did. I sat in on this class.
And I didn't understand a single word that went on. It was way above anything I knew at all. And I thought, this graduate student, if they're all like that, what am I doing here? What I didn't realize is that graduate student was Michael Atiyah. Michael Atiyah was later to become a Fields Medalist, become one of the first winners of the, there's another prize, mathematics prize, the Dirac Medal.
No, no, it's a play on Nobel, but it's somebody else. Arbel Prize. That's right. The Arbel Prize. He was one of the earliest winners of the Arbel Prize and he became president of the Royal Society. Anyway, he was obviously not your average student. That's what I mean. The fact that he sort of and he became very important in my life later on by telling me that things I was trying to do were really cohomology.
which I had no knowledge about. When I found this way of doing integrals for finding, yes, I was interested in this, just what I was trying to say in a way, the solutions that Ted Newman had found, and I tried to convert them into Twister theory, which I realized you could do in a way, but by making Twister theory curved. And you can make it curved provided
You don't have any what I've later called alpha planes. I mean, when you don't have beta, you have alpha planes. I've got to set it the wrong way. As long as you have alpha planes. Alpha planes are things which can only exist if half of the conformal curvature vanishes. When I say half, it's a bit difficult to do that in space-time for space because the signature is wrong. You can do it for the kinds of space
Geometry is for geometries that mathematicians like because the signature is right for them. You have got all pluses. You take your metric. It's all got pluses and they like that and that gives you a nice theory and you can make that what's called anti-self dual. If the vial curvature, that's the conformal curvature, it splits into two parts. Make one part zero and the other part still exists and you get these curved solutions.
If you try to do that with spacetimes, and if they were real spacetimes, you can't, well you can, but it doesn't get you very far, because the Vierkerve to the two parts, one is the complex conjugate of the other. So if one of them is zero, the other one is zero. So it's not, it's conformally flat. It's not interesting as a conformal manifold. However, Ted Newman didn't worry about these things. That was my Pittsburgh colleague who I
did a lot of work with. He was a very inspirational, inspiring character, and he had this idea of sort of complexifying space in a way which was sort of half doing it. And in that half doing it way, you could see that you could do what I was trying to do. And this led to what I would refer to later as the nonlinear graviton. It's this complex space-time
for which this vial curvature part does vanish. And so you can do Twister theory in it. In this complex space time, you say, what's it good for in physics? Ah, well, what's complex naturally in physics? Wave functions. So if you're doing complex stuff, you could be doing quantum theory. So this could be a wave function of a crazy sort. So it's what I used to call a nonlinear graviton.
So it's the wave function of a graviton, but it's not the ordinary linear wave function. You see, normal quantum mechanics is linear. You can add one wave function to another. And the whole point about, well, not the whole point, but the big point about quantum mechanics is that you have the superposition principle. You can add states together. The wave functions is a linear thing. You can add them.
Now this thing was a nonlinear thing. You can't add one solution to another. It's just a solution. It's a complex solution of the vacuum Einstein equations which has this twist to it and the viral curvature vanishes and you have twisters. The kind of twisters you have are a new kind which are curved. So you can have these curved twisters. It makes sense. However it's a bit stuck
If you want to have your physics out of it, because it's to do with this conflict or confusion, I would say, in twisted theories, inbuilt into the whole subject. You see, positive and negative frequency is what I was striving for, and I sort of haven't got to that because I got a little confused in my discussion here. But you see, it does turn out to do positive and negative frequency. It took a long time for me to see that.
I was driven to positive and negative helicity. They could see that almost directly. The photons twist one way or the other way. And that's what classical twister theory does for you. But then if you start to do integrals and things like that, you can see it's a little bit more confused. And then you can see these integral things you're doing are really wave functions. And if they're wave functions, then they can have positive and negative separately frequency. The right handed
They can be right-handed or left-handed, depending on whether it's twisters or dual twisters, and they can be positive frequency as well. But you've got to talk to them about complex solutions. So it's this confusion between the two which, in a sense, limited twister theory to the situations in which you have alpha planes. Now, I haven't said what an alpha plane is, but these are integral. The vanishing of this half of the vial curvature
is the integrability condition for the existence of alpha planes. So that if you have the alpha planes, they are the twisters. So if your plane has alpha planes, each alpha plane is associated with a twister. And that's the geometrical description. But real space time doesn't have any alpha planes in it. Only much more recently, I considered what you do. You consider what I call by twisters. Now, by twisters, I described in the paper
Which was in honor of CN Yang. It's very much delayed with this paper because I was trying to work things out and it came out, but it's in honor of CN Yang's 100th birthday, I should say. He's still alive as far as I'm aware. This was two years ago or something. So it came out. So I wrote this paper, which was about Biotwisters and about the connection with split Octonians. So I mentioned right at the beginning, the
The Hamiltonian quaternions. Right. And you have the analog of that. When you go up, these are things called octonians. It didn't take long after Hamiltonian produces quaternions and various several people independently discovered this generalization to these eight dimensional things, which are called octonians. I was aware of the octonians and I was aware that there were split ones as well, where you have four plus signs and four minus signs. And I thought maybe there's something to do with Twister theory there.
I didn't know what it was. That was just a hunch at that point. Well, this was what this paper was really the result, because I could see how to do it. You can actually describe the split octonians. You have to have a product. Now, going back to what I said at the beginning, quaternions, you take two product to two gives you a third. Now it's a product of three things give you a fourth. You make one that you choose another element, make it the unit element. And then this other two gives you the split octonian product.
So it does give you the split octonians. I only vaguely thought maybe there's some connection at one time and later I say it really does. It gives you the split octonians. But for that you really need these things called bitwisters. You've got to combine a twister and a dual twister. Otherwise these things don't even exist. There's got to be that combination and you have a bigger space.
But what's nice about it from the physics point of view is you sort of got rid of this inherent twist into the theory. They're not really twisters in the sense that the twist goes one way rather than the other. So it removes this awkward confusion between helicity and frequency. It's the positive frequency and positive helicity. Helicity are two different concepts, but in Twister theory they can fuse as being the same.
So I want to ask about definitions because when you're an undergrad, people tend to think that you focus on proofs and that's what it is to be a researcher. And Grothendieck said that what's more important are definitions. So he would say you keep your definitions convoluted and you make your proof simple. What makes a good definition in physics though?
We're going back to Grotendieck. You see, when I was talking about my period in Cambridge, I was really an outsider working on this particular problem that Hodges suggested, although it was a bit like Twister theory in a way. You see, if you want to describe a curve and a twisted cubic is a good example. You don't have one equation for it. You can think of it as an intersection of two quadrics where you throw away a line. The normal intersection is a quadric, quartic surface. You may specialize it so
It's a line and a cubic, and that cubic is called a twisted cubic. It's not the intersection of two hyper surfaces. But can you write down an equation for it? Yes, you can. You think of your space of straight lines and those straight lines which meet the curve is one condition, and that gives you a form. And this is the Cayley form thing. And that's what I was actually working on. Not that, but how do you do that in higher dimensions? How do you work out how things intersect and stuff like that?
It got rather too messy. So I had to develop a diagrammatic notation for handling all the complications. That's another story too. I won't tell you that one now, but anyway, um, growth and deke growth and deke was the big high priest of all. I think initially it was sort of craps up before you got to growth and he was the real high priest. And, and that's what people like a tear were doing. And,
making it more and more abstract as you went on. I was going on a completely different route. I was thinking about something concrete. Well, it was much more concrete. Yes. I mean, I could think of light rays meeting curves, not light rays, straight lines meeting curves. That was my problem with that character. But you do that in higher dimensions.
Yeah, there's a phrase abstract nonsense. Have you heard of that about category theory? That's that's right. That's that's the whole that's your feeling as a whole move. You see that? Yeah, that's what they were all doing. To this day. That's what Michael Michael it was a great expert in that subject. Oh, yeah. And Groton Dieck was a greater expert. What he what was there was a sort of
Sure. What do you see as the tension between gravity and quantum mechanics? So you mentioned linear. Some people think one is nonlinear and the other is linear and that's where the tension is. Some people say it's non-commuting variables on one side and then commuting variables on the other. There is a big tension. Observable, sorry. But there's a worse tension.
You see, there's a tension in the sense that general relativity is not really linear. It's non-linear, you see. And people like in quantum mechanics, they like linear things. They don't care how many dimensions it is. It could be a million dimensions. It could be infinite number of dimensions. Lots of things are. They love infinite dimensions. That's fine in quantum theory. But space-time has got three plus one. From that point of view, it's pretty boring. It's only got a finite number of dimensions.
The space-time has, and Einstein of course, well he was a good, he got his Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics of course, but the photoelectric effect was just nothing to do with GR. But he was, some people like, some physicists even, like to say Einstein was wrong. They like to tout that, they like to write that on a t-shirt. Well they were all saying that then. You see that was nothing new in those days. Einstein's generally, well I know he was,
Of course, it was the Eddington expedition, which suddenly startled everybody to show the bending of light was in agreement with Einstein's theory. And that did change things. It made Einstein a big celebrity, too. I'm sure it was a big thing, but it didn't really make the quantum field quantum field theory of quantum people didn't like curved spaces because they're all flat spaces. They may have infinite dimensions, but they're flat as a pancake.
They don't fit in very well with the basis of general relativity. And then perhaps you want me to go in that other route because there's another way they don't fit in together, which is another thing. It's not so much Twister theory as it stands, but it's an important thing. Consciousness? Collapse? Collapse. Yes, there's consciousness, but that's our idea.
There are too many stories here. We're going to talk about consciousness as well. Let's stick with the collapse for now. No, the collapse is important. We have to do that first anyway. You see, I always thought that I didn't like the collapse of the wave function as being, I mean, quantum theory was terribly confused. You see, you've got the beautiful, well, think of the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger was confused. I mean, he understood why he was confused. I mean, he was absolutely on the ball.
But lots of people were confused. Anyway, let me not go into that story. You say take a quantum system. How do you describe it? You take the wave function or vector in Hilbert space or something, the wave function, take the wave function. How does that evolve in time? Schrodinger equation. So it evolves in time, according to Schrodinger equation. Is that the way the world evolves in time? No, it doesn't, because you cheat. You say, no, no, you've got to a certain point and you
Make a measurement. What does making a measurement mean? I don't know. People have funny ideas about making a measure. The trouble is the word observation, I think, crept in there a little too... Too sneakily, too early? Too sneakily, too strongly, I would say. Because people think as many, one of the big proponents of this view was Vigna, Eugene Vigna. And I actually, when I was in Princeton, I did talk to Vigna about it.
I had a long lunch talk with him and I talked about this issue of consciousness, if you like, collapse the wave function because that was the Vigna view. He was not so dogmatic about that view as I was expecting. He was saying it's a view, but I don't think for many reasons it really makes sense. But it was nevertheless, I think a lot of people, even von Neumann seemed to have that sort of idea too. A lot of people had the idea
That it was a conscious being observing the system, which somehow changes the rules. You change your wave function and write it down in terms of its certain basis. And then you give the amplitudes and then you look at these complex amplitudes, square them, square the modulus and that makes your probabilities. So then what would they say, not to take you off track, but what would they say is that what observes the observer?
And I don't say any of that, you see. I don't care what they say. I don't know what they say because it's not what I say. And I think it's wrong. So although I think consciousness has relates to it question, it's in a completely different way. It's not what collapses the wave function. What collapses the wave function is physics. So there is something in physics which collapses the wave function. The Schrodinger equation quantum theory as a whole is wrong.
It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. Now I say this very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. I mean, Einstein and Schrodinger are much more polite. They said it was incomplete. Okay, incomplete means wrong. Well, you're telling it like it is. Yeah, you've got to change it. So it's wrong. But
Incomplete is a more polite way of saying it's wrong. Okay, they're fine. I should be polite sometimes to quantum mechanics, although it's pretty robust as it is. It doesn't mind people like me being rude to it. But anyway, so Einstein and Schrodinger both thought that it was wrong, that the theory needed some amendment, could be an important amendment, which changes the nature of the whole subject, quite likely.
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Could be an important amendment which changes the nature of the whole subject, quite likely. So you think both Einstein's both general relativity and quantum mechanics need to be modified or primarily quantum mechanics and a tinge to general relativity? I would say more importantly quantum mechanics. You see, people sometimes say to combine these two great theories, you've got to quantize general relativity. Can you explain what does it mean to quantize?
You mean to haul it into the framework of quantum theory. So you have, you make it into a Hilbert space and operators and goodness knows what. And you sum over metrics or sum over geometry. Lots of people were trying to, Wheeler was trying to do that when I was in Princeton. Yeah. Lots of people were trying to do that. Bryce DeWitt was certainly trying to do that. And so when you speak to string theorists, they would say, well, that's quite obviously the approach where the only finite quantum gravity game in town. Yes.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with quantizing gravity. It's just the weak. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't read the right adjective, but let me... You don't have to be polite anymore. No, no, I'm not going to be polite here. I'm trying to be more illustrative, what I mean. I mean, I sometimes talk about a space, a planet, a distant planet, which has an atmosphere on it, just like it's a planet very much like the Earth, almost identical.
There's a space probe going out to look at it because it's very interesting. However, there is no life on it. No life has ever evolved on it. There are no butterflies to flap their wings and weather is supposed to be a chaotic thing and so even sensitive to the flapping of a butterfly's wing. There aren't any butterflies on this planet. There are no conscious beings on that planet.
So all the different weathers that they might have on that planet are all co-exist in superposition. It's a mess. The probe is going out to take a photo, takes a photograph of this mess. It comes back to the Earth and when it's within distance of being able to send signals to the Earth, somebody's sitting against the screen and finally the first picture of the weather on that planet, this person looks at it, snap!
His consciousness or her consciousness makes that world into weather, into one weather. What could be more absurd? Absolutely ridiculous. It's lightweight and where it doesn't have any interest in us. Why does its weather become one? Just because this chap's been taking a photograph of it. Absolute nonsense. I'm just trying to emphasize that I don't believe it is consciousness that collapses the wave function.
Instead, it's the collapse of the wave function that produces consciousness. Well, that's my other story, which I think is is another story. And it's a story which I also tried to pursue to some degree. I don't regard this as what I do most in my life, because I is too much biology and things like that, which I don't know anything about. Are you headed to microtubules being the
mechanism or the place are you just saying look if it's going to occur needs to occur somewhere in the brain this chap names steward hammer off put up his hand and say it could be microtubules i found this in the brain and then you said okay well maybe that's more lesson yeah yes it wasn't quite like that
But I do think microtubules are a good candidate for various reasons. But you wouldn't be heartbroken if it turned out to be some other structure. Heartbroken is too strong. I'd be a bit disappointed, yes. Oh. Because I think microtubules... No, there are various features of microtubules that I find fascinating. I don't think it's a coincidence. Did you see the recent news about the superradiance in microtubules? I did hear something. I didn't see it. Was that on the... It said that there are quantum effects that are coherent in microtubules.
Do you feel vindicated from that? The trouble is I did look at the paper which was referred, I think if it's the same one you're talking about, I did look at the paper. Stuart is mentioned, there is a reference to this, but it doesn't really talk about his stuff. It looks like something else. I don't know, I might be connected. Look, I'm not a biologist, so I'm not even a chemist.
I find chemists too difficult for chemistries. It's full of words that I can't remember. Yeah, same. I was supposed to be a doctor. My parents were both doctors. They thought I should be a doctor. They were both medically trained. I was the one they thought would be the doctor. They won in the end because my little sister eventually got a doctor and she married one too. So they got two for the price of one. No, I disappointed them terribly. I would have been hopeless because I don't remember names these things. You can tell I forget them immediately.
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So I'm jumping ahead because the audience is familiar with that gravity has something to do with the collapse of the wave function. Let me make that a little more specific. Sure. You see, I wasn't so clear on that until much more later, I think, just a little before the turn of the century. I can't quite remember when. It took me a little while before I actually wrote the paper on it. I wrote a paper on it which was to explain a conflict, that's a conflict,
between the two basic principles, one of general relativity, the other of quantum mechanics. What's the basic principle of general relativity? It's the principle of equivalence, which Einstein admitted. He didn't give Galileo credit. I think he should have given a reference to Galileo. I'm not sure he did because Galileo already noticed
The principle of equivalence. And he talked about, I like the one of the fireworks. He describes his fireworks. Go out and they make this beautiful sphere of sparks. As it falls, it remains a sphere. You can get rid of gravity by free fall, locally. I mean, he's very explicit. Not just the big rocks and the little rocks, why the feather doesn't because of here is a sense and all that. I mean, he was right. But, um,
Of course, you needed special relativity and make those into a four-dimensional spacetime, as Minkowski did, and then bend it as Einstein did. So the collapse and gravity come in? Nothing there. But my argument is that the principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity, is in conflict with the principle of superposition. And the argument
is more or less this. I say think of an experiment done in the lab on the tabletop and you want to take the Earth's gravitational field into consideration. Now there are two ways you might do this. The way any sensible physicist would do it, you put a term in the Hamiltonian, if you don't know what that means don't worry, put a term in the Hamiltonian for the gravitational field and just chug away the usual procedures. Fine.
Then you notice that Einstein sitting in the corner or Galileo even and tell you, no, no, no, you shouldn't do it that way. The gravitational field of the earth is locally just like free fall. So you can consider your lab, your coordinates are falling and the lab is just accelerating in this thing. And there's no gravitational field. OK, you do it this other way. It's a different way, different coordinates. You do it away and you come up. Eventually you come up with
almost the same answer. The key of course is in the almost. The wave function you get is just the same except for the complex multiplier which people, the phase factor if you like, which people would quite like to discard because when they're going to measure anything that you observe they're taking amplitudes, you take squares and moduli, so you don't worry too much about that.
Until you look rather too carefully at this actual factor, which is different between these two procedures, that actual factor involves the time, an exponential of the time cubed. And that is not that serious, if you're really thinking of quantum field theory, that's serious because that's telling you that's a different vacuum. You're actually working in a different vacuum.
So you might say, well, you still might say who cares because you say stick to your vacuum and you get the right answer at the end. OK, so I'm going to change the problem a little bit, rather seriously, actually. I'm going to say that in this experiment, there was a lump of some sort. OK, which is put into a superposition of two locations. So it's a little little stone which goes into two places.
a little bead or something, which is part of the experiment. Now, I try to use the Einsteinian Galilean Einstein perspective and I ran into trouble because as I get close to the bead, I see that the whether it's here or here, I can't get rid of them both at once. And that's, of course, the Einstein problem, which is a general relativity. I can't get rid of them both at once by free fall. So what do I do? I do what any sensible physicist would do. I cheat.
I say okay I know I should be using the Einstein perspective but let's just try instead measure the mistake that I'm making by adopting that by the Newtonian perspective. So I adopt the Newtonian perspective but keep track of what might be a little error in doing it. Then I integrate that error over space and I do a little integration by parts and some little bit of fiddling around with it and I get with
An answer which looks like a uncertainty in the mass of a system. It is the mass of the system, but it's not the fact that it's a superposition. It gives me an uncertainty of that mass. Now I can measure and now the thing is that's a bit like particle physics where you have, if you have a decaying particle, its mass is not completely well defined. It hasn't
an era of fuzziness in its mass, which is given by the Heisenberg time-energy uncertainty principle. So its lifetime, if it's an unstable particle, is inversely related to this sort of fuzziness in its mass. Now here I have a fuzziness in the energy of the system, the mass energy of the system, so I say that's the reciprocal of that in natural units.
When I say natural units, I mean making all the things equal to one that you can do, as Dirac sort of pointed out, I guess. And I get the formula, which Deoshi had already discovered a couple of years earlier than me. Right, for different reasons. I didn't know he'd done that. It was a different argument. But I thought this was a nice argument because it just revealed the tension between these two very basic principles. Principles of equivalence
and the principle of superposition. And they're a bit in conflict with each other. And the resolution of this conflict comes through allowing your unstable state to collapse into one or the other. Now, it's what you only get from this way of looking at it is an uncertainty in the mass. And I know that the event's looking directly at this thing rather than looking at the collapse, which is a powerful thing to exploit.
And just for people who are wondering about Yvette Fuentes, there's a podcast on screen right now where we go into two hours in depth into this topic. Now, do you have a mechanism for why or how gravity collapses the wave function? Or do you just say it has to collapse? That's where the new theory has to come in. I'm just saying, look, I have a problem. I need a theory. No, all I can say is that it tells me how big the
factor should be. It tells you you can measure this uncertainty and it's not so hard. You just think of the bead that I was looking at. Imagine the two copies of the same bead and I move it into this superposition and I ask how much energy would that cost me where I ignore all forces except gravity. Very tiny usually but nevertheless it's enough to collapse the
It's not a theory in the sense that his was. I mean, I think his ideas got, as far as I'm aware, rather shot down by the Gran Sasso experiments, was it? They took the thing down a mineshaft or something. No, it's to do with the heating. They anticipate bodies spontaneously heat.
Which I don't want. That shouldn't happen. But that's because the collapse has a very curious. You see, if you want to make it consistent with special relatively, don't worry about general specific amount. You're really already in trouble because you imagine a body going splitting. It's the superposition. It's not two bodies. It's one body superposition of here and here. They get very far away from each other. They haven't collapsed yet. And now they're going to collapse. One goes in whose frame does that happen?
Is that a frame you should be talking about? How do you make that consistent? Well, what you got to do, I mean, I worried about that. Lots of people seem not to worry about that. I worried about that. You say, okay, the only thing you can do, which is relatively, I mean, there are other wrong routes you can take, which I won't go into because there's quite a bit of a more story than I'm making out here. The only route you can take is to say the collapse actually
took place right back to where the split initially took, and then there was only one route. But what about the other route? Well, what I have to do is to describe things in terms of two different kinds of reality. One of them is quantum reality and one of them is classical reality. So one doesn't give rise to the other? They're actually separate? Well, it's the quantum reality, if you like, which does give rise to the way that the classical reality behaves.
But it does it in a kind of retro-causal way. So that's what's so confusing. In a kind of retro-causal way, or is it retro-causal? It's kind of retro-causal. Okay, explain. I'm saying this deliberately because it's only quantum reality. You see, this is a puzzle I think people, it was a puzzle I had, and you can resolve this in a rather peculiar way. You might say, oh sure, if it was retro-causal and it went back to the beginning, then
How do you, what am I trying to say? You can travel faster than light. Yeah, you can travel faster than light or backwards in time or something. Sure. So I've got to tackle that problem or you can signal signal backwards in time. That's the thing. And you were trying to retain a special relativity before because I'm just saying you can't do that because if you think of Alice and Bob, I wish I had this in some notes, which I which I circulated, but I don't think it was actually published. It's sort of pseudo published.
You see, I have a book, the book I wrote, which was with the Princeton University Press called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. The fashion was about string theory, which I'm not sure was still so fashionable now, but it was then. Faith was quantum mechanics at all levels. And fantasy actually had to do with
cosmology it was to do with inflationary cosmology because i simply thought inflation is much too fantastic that's another story but the fashion so i had to write this new preface they're going to bring it it's out now i think it's almost out now a new printing of fashion i wasn't allowed to change anything in the book but i was allowed to write a new preface and i do give an outline of this idea i think i do the retrocausal thing you see the thing is think about the the
Standard EPR. So you have a spin zero state splits into two halves, spin half, and Alice takes one off in the spaceship and Bob takes it up on another half. Alice makes a measurement. What do I say happens to the quantum reality? It's a quantum measurement. It propagates, quantum reality propagates along the path like
What could be crazier than that? The backwards way along the past like it hits Bob's world line way earlier than he does his experiment. So his state is already changed into the one which is the opposite of Alice's state. Bob makes his measurement later. He doesn't know what the state is. Alice can only communicate classically with him.
This is a quantum information, quantum reality information. Quantum reality, you cannot measure, you can only ascertain. Explain the difference between ascertaining and confirming, because when you were on stage with Sabine Haassenfelder, you said, you can confirm, I think it was the classical level, you can confirm, whereas at the quantum you can ascertain, like you can ask a question. That's right. Well, you see that it is really Einstein,
It's Einstein's fault because he was saying, I think a lot of people were worrying about the reality of the wave function. Is it real? Is it really there? Not real, it's complex, you see. It's not real in the sense of real numbers, but is it really there? And Einstein produced the statement. He said, well, a concept of reality isn't introducing.
which is if you can make if there's a measurement you can make on the system without disturbing it and which with hundred percent certainty gives the answer yes then that measurement is revealing an element of reality so he says that the state the quantum state is real in that sense what he didn't say as far as i'm aware is that is quantum reality it's not classical reality think of the spin of a spin half particle
That's I think I always like spin half past. Sure. Simplest thing to say. Spin up and spin down, if you like. Spin right and spin left. Suppose it spin is about that way. If I know through its origin, where did that spin come from? Oh, yes, I know. Oh, it should be spinning that way. Wait, sorry. Is this a hidden variable that it's carrying with it? It's not hidden variables. Forget about BOM. Forget about BOM. I had endless arguments with Basil Haley on that topic.
And I prefer not to go back there when I was at Birkbeck College. All right. Let's not talk about hidden variables. If you can call them hidden variables, you can, but that's not my idea. It's not that. Got it. It's quantum reality. So the state is that, but it has a quantum reality of spinning right handed about that particular direction. And we know it is because we've set up and we've produced it in that state.
You could do that by some experiment and it comes out in that state. Now, I'm going to use Einstein's criterion. I can measure the spin in that direction using, you know, as long as it's got a magnetic dipole or something, I can measure it and I can every if I've got it right every time I measure it or I can measure the same experiment many times over 100 percent certainly that's real.
That's what Einstein said is his element of reality. I'm just slightly modifying what he said. It's an element of quantum reality. It's not classical reality. I can't say to the state, hello state, which way are you pointing? Just looks at you blankly. It says that I don't answer questions like that. Give me a better question. You see, if I say, are you spinning that way? It can say no. Yes.
If you say which way are you spinning, it doesn't answer that question. That's a quantum reality thing. Quantum reality doesn't. You can't ascertain it. That's when I say you can't ascertain. You can't ascertain which way it's spinning. However, you can confirm which way it's spinning by the Einstein criteria. I see. Now if Alice and Bob, you see, if Alice
propagates back in time. Bob's state is already, in a certain sense, the opposite of what Alice is going to measure. But Bob can't ask the state which way you're spinning. If he could, then you could send signals faster than that. The whole of special relativity goes down the tubes. The whole of modern physics does. So that's not a good idea. So quantum reality, sure.
Bob can't say. He can ask it. His spinning state says don't ask me such a question. I don't answer questions like that. Suggests a direction. So he does. He suggests a different direction. He has no idea what Alice has spinned. I did worry about this quite a lot by saying can he ascertain which way Alice is measuring it and even if you don't know which answer she gets. So there's a bit of a subtlety there because she might orient her apparatus in some way
And does that information somehow, you want to make sure that can't be ascertained by Bob either. Uh huh. That she's free to choose independently? She's free to choose. She says, yeah, but she might say, Oh, I think I'm going to choose that direction because that Bob's keen on that direction or something. And that will tell me I'm happy. No, she can't do that. Have you thought about free will? I thought about it.
In fact, I thought about it even quite recently. First of all, I think it's useless kind of thought because because even though you see Stuart is very keen on free will because he says that this theory of microtubules and all that stuff gives a room for free will. So maybe it does in a way, but you see often people say, well, it's all determined anyway. And so I think
People get a little bit confused. Going back to my experiences I used to have when I was very young and my younger brother was even younger, and he could always wallop me at this game, scissors, paper, stone. And I thought, how can he be walloping at that game of chance? Right. So to make sure it was a game of chance that he couldn't wallop me at.
I went into my father's study and I got out a book of logarithms and went into the middle of it and got out the string of numbers and produced which way you went by the string of numbers, followed it very carefully, and he couldn't beat me. So I thought, thank goodness, he's not reading my mind. It's just that he knows it's recognizing patterns and things like that. He's good at that. Maybe even unconsciously, he recognizes patterns and he knows which way I'm going to do next because I'm not really being random. So it's not randomness.
Yes, the free will is not random. So what is it? You see, I maybe I thought, you see, I think it's probably it's you're free to do something which may be very well determined. You see, you might do I take course A or course B, maybe in some meeting, you see, which making decisions about some big plan. And you want to know what is the consequence of doing A or B?
Well, then you rely on your understanding of which is the right thing to do. So free will, it might be the same as somebody would do just by chance. That's not the point. The point is that you've used your consciousness as something to employ in making your decision. So that's what free will is for, in a sense. I don't know if I can say much more. And I also get impressed by things
I hear things about bees and they're unbelievable. Yeah. And they seem to play. Un-bee-lievable. Un-bee-lievable. Yes, well, they, they, they, they, even they play, play football. They're some, they were telling me about little, they, mostly they're not trying to hunt for honey. They, they do things in little balls and they kick them around. There's some kind of football that they play. Why are they doing that? For fun?
That would mean they have to be conscious, doesn't it? Maybe they are. I don't know. I don't have a view on this. I do believe that consciousness goes way down in the animal kingdom, sure. Is the universe discrete or continuous? I used to be very keen on discrete. People told me I got to go into anecdotes. I'm too old. I just talk about anecdotes in the physics. If you want an anecdote, I can give you an anecdote. I used to be very keen on discreteness. There were two things in mathematics that I thought, oh,
These are the nice things for physics, ultimately, to be based on combinatorial things or maybe complex numbers. And I think I sort of that time thought combinatorial things. I'm surprised if you came from algebraic geometry that you would be more keen to the finite side, the discrete side. I probably was at that time. You said I had a sort of gradual conversion. I think the conversion came with David Finkelstein when, as he said after his talk,
He gave this talk that Dennis Sharma took me to when I was a research fellow at St. John's in Cambridge. And we drove to London to hear this lecture given by David Finkelstein, which was on the Schwarzschild horizon, which is not a singular, is a horizon. And he described that. And I found that amazing. I thought it was very beautiful. At the end of the talk, I had a long chat with him about spin networks. So I described the spin networks to him.
And he told me afterwards that this meeting, we swapped subjects. I did general relativity from then on, and he had been doing GR, he swapped under combinatorics. I consider I got much the better deal. But that's, you see, I was thinking about combinatorial things and spin networks are very much that kind of thing. Can you not think about the complex numbers which give you the directions of spin for a spin half particle? Or do you instead think about this network, which is really the important thing?
and the direction comes out of the network. I was playing with that idea. You said you've changed your tune now to be on the more continuous side or continuum side. Well, the power of complex analysis was the other thing which had impressed me and it's more drifted onto that side. Do you think the continuous lies at the classical level and then the discreteness lies at the quantum one? Do you think that's the way to quote unquote unify them or harmonize them?
I wouldn't say anything like that is, I mean maybe. There's something, well obviously there's something discrete in quantum mechanics. I mean something which people used to think was continuous, shock shock, is actually discrete. Now speaking of what people used to think, you used to think that AI couldn't do what mathematicians do. Do you still hold that view because of their limitations, their formal systems? In a certain sense, yes.
I mean, you've got to be a little careful about these things. But I was hearing this recently, I think it was on Zoom Talk. Yeah, the remarkable 01 model or 01 model of chat GPT. What would be an example of something mathematical that you think a computer could never do this? Well, it doesn't do anything. You've got to tell him. Well, even if you put it on play, you just
Press play and you say generate for me some math because if it's the auto play that is that's the issue here. That's easily solvable I mean it with this to there's a confusion I think I mean it was also important to me See because one of the talks that I attended when I was a graduate student in Cambridge nothing to do with what I was doing was a talk by a man called steam on mathematical logic and I learned about the I went about computer notion of computability. I learned about the girdle theorem
I found it stunning because what it told me, you want to prove something in mathematics, how's this statement? What the Gödel theorem says, it says I am not provable by your methods, yet I know it's true. Why do I know it's true? I know it's true by virtue of my belief that the proof procedures only give you truths.
There is the idea that people can brain upload. That is, they can take your consciousness and put it onto a computer. What are your views on that? I'm saying no on that one, definitely. If a computer, when you say the word computer, you have to be saying what I mean by a computer and what Turing meant by a computer, which is a computational system. So if it's that, no is the answer. If you're talking about a physical entity, which is not an animal or not living being in our ordinary sense of the word, maybe.
But it has to take advantage of what we're taking advantage of without even worrying about it, which is presumably here I'm going way outside of what I know, but I'm saying it's whatever the physics is which governs the collapse of the wave function. Right. Now that is not quantum physics because quantum physics doesn't have an answer to that question. It's this physics which combines GR with quantum mechanics.
Do you think if quantum theory was not to be modified, then the many-worlds interpretation is the way to go?
Oh, what I mean to say is, do you think quantum theory as it stands implies the many worlds theory? Yeah, I'm in a sense yes, because it says all these things are in superposition. But I'm not quite sure what the many worlds theory is.
Because it can't be just that. Otherwise, I wouldn't see just one world. So what is the rest of the theory, which tells me that I only see a limited proportion that may be there in superposition, but not many? Certainly not as different as they could be. I don't see all these alternatives. Now, is that to do with this little creature crawling through this multitude? Now, why doesn't this partner creature going off in another branch
I'm just saying it's wrong. You're trying to say if I believed in quantum mechanics, yes, but then I can believe in a wrong thing and I get another wrong answer. I'm just being my rude self to say that quantum is wrong. We like that on toe on theories of everything.
So you were recently speaking to Bernardo Castrop about idealism, which is about consciousness as fundamental. So maybe you don't recall, but it doesn't matter. The point is some people believe consciousness to be fundamental. Was this a video thing? Yeah. No, I think I did recover that. Yeah. Okay. Yes, I think he was saying things which seemed to me orthogonal to what I was saying. Okay, so please recount your views on is consciousness fundamental?
Yes and no. How's that for an answer? A superposition answer. It depends at what level you're asking this question. I mean, if there were no consciousness, I can't see. You see, a question like this has to have a framework. You see, I'm talking within a certain framework of theories.
What's something that you used to be dismissive of when you were younger, that you used to disregard, repudiate, and now as you're older that you're more open to it? Oh, I see. Oh, no, no, it's worse. I've got more narrow-minded as I got older. Interesting. Oh, yes. I'm terribly narrow-minded now. I'm prepared to listen to other things, sure, but I'm
No, I think CCC is right. I think that collapse of the wave function is right. It's a gravitational effect. Can you talk about that, about the CCC? No. Yeah. Just briefly, if you don't mind. Sure. Well, it was one thing when I was saying fashion, faith and fantasy, the fantasy was inflation. So I don't believe in inflation. Right. The current view of cosmology is that the very early stages of the universe, first tiny fraction of a second, there was this inflationary phase.
which was supposed to have smoothed out the universe and that's why it seems so uniform now it's a load of poppycock as far as i'm concerned i don't know about that word to use here it's probably poppycock's early mouth because if you reverse time it gives you the wrong answer i mean what black hole singularities are i mean any theory which would iron out singularities should iron out the singularities in black holes they're completely different the singularities in black holes have
are absolutely wildly diverging via curvature. The singularity in the Big Bang was an extraordinarily special event. I haven't seen any explanation of this, and I had various wrong explanations of my own. I thought that maybe quantum, yes, when you have quantum theory, I was trying to say that singularities had to be one way around.
What would you like your legacy to be? So it's really fairly equally split, I think, between CCC, on the one hand, the cosmological picture, and all the wave functions. You see, the theory there is not developed enough for anything there. It needs much more. You see, the theory, that's more twisted, twisters in their offspring. And I'm hoping that, you see, when I talked about
Talk to too many people today. And did I talk to you about the product of three vectors? I did, didn't I? Yes. Yes. You see, you multiply, you have, in Twister theory, in By-Twister theory, you have a product of three things gives you a fourth. And this is useful if you want to talk about split octonians. But there's another thing which might be useful for. Those three, it's really the span of those three things. It's like a vector product. It's not your, if you lost the vectors, it's really the span of the two.
It's a way you talk about the plane. So with the three things, it's the way you talk about the three space. Now, that's awfully tempting to me to think that that might have something to do with strong interactions. This is the SU-3. That's where the SU-3 resides. See, in one of my conversations with Feynman, they're all stories and each one is a nice story, but I had a conversation with Feynman, which Stephen Hawking had organized and it was
And he was a bit grumpy because he, Stephen had disturbed his holiday. But anyway, and I was trying to describe Twister theory to him. And then I was trying to describe how you might describe particle physics in it. And he said, that's don't follow that route. He said, Twister, when I say about Twister, is it very interesting? Yes, keep that going. But don't try to follow that particular route towards particle physics. That's wrong.
That's not a fruitful route. And he was completely right. That was wrong. It was much too early. So we tried to do particle physics with twisters, putting a few of them together and all that. And I think that was wrong. I think he was right. He was right that I was wrong. However, doesn't mean that the thing with bite, it's much more like what it's more, it's more like SU three, because you really don't care where the vectors are. It's the space.
And it's a way of attributing another entity to it. I don't know if I can say what I mean. It's a bit more like the other exact gauge theory there is in physics, which is electromagnetism. And you do have a thing like this in bitwister theory as well. You have this thing which I call multiplying by i. I needed that as well. So it's another, it's a circle. So you have this circle and you have this three-dimensional space. The question is, what do you want your legacy to be?
Well, I say it's a twist of theory, you see, but CCC is quite a good one for a legacy, I guess, because it does change our picture of cosmology completely. Do you believe it to be the case or do you just posit that as a possibility? Look, it's a completely different story. In this case, there is strong evidence that nobody pays any attention to, but I say nobody, not quite anymore. Conformal cyclic cosmology. We see these signals.
I mean, there isn't a nice, a nice wrongness about them too. Okay. But the wrongness is just a factor of two. I mean, all of these are anecdotes. As I said, I'm too old to do physics. I just do anecdotes. No, I had Zoom, not Zoom. This was just email communication with Alan, Alan Guth about cosmology. Yes. That's right.
And he was telling me about, I would give him all the credit, he put our boots on and followed exactly what we should do in our calculations. And he said, your calculation of how big the Hawking points are, these are spots which we claim are there observed with strong observational 99.98% confidence level.
Particle physicists tell me that's much too small. You need much more confidence level than that. It's only about three sigma or something. I don't know what all that means, but that's what they tell me. But still, for cosmology, that's pretty confident level. And these spots are there. They're all the same size. They're all about eight times the diameter of the full moon.
Alan Guth tells me, you're wrong. There should be four times the damage. He doesn't tell me the damage. He tells in terms of radians or minutes of arc or something. I forget what that means. So I'm used to the full moon. I'm using my low grade. There are only four times. He said there should be four times. So I email Christoph and I say, look, Alan Guth tells me we got the wrong size. They're not eight. They're only four times. Christoph tells me, no, that can't be wrong. I go and check, but he's sure he's just made a mistake.
He comes back to me. He's right. They should only be four times. So we have to do something with our theory. We have an idea what you should do. It doesn't change the whole scheme. I mean, ordinary cosmology doesn't get them at all. Getting just a factor of two wrong is mild, it's minimal. And they're seen both in WMAP and in Planck. I'm only counting the ones which are strongest
and which are the strongest ones, which are the same ones as seen both in WMAP and Planck. There are five points, but I see points, so these little spots in the sky, five of them, which we see in exactly the same places in WMAP and in Planck. Confidence level calculated by Christoph, because I don't know how to do that kind of thing, 99.98% confidence level. People contact me and say they don't believe us.
People say, no, I've done the calculus all by different way, and I only get 95% confidence level. Okay, well, you could use your methods you like, but that's not interesting to me. You just outlined how you'd like to be remembered in physics. And I'm curious how you'd like to be remembered as a person. As a person? Not too much of an idiot, I hope. Well, look, there's a book coming out any minute. I better read it first.
Now see how it tells me if I might be remembered by people. I don't know. Who's taking on the torch that you're passing? Who are the people? Yeah. And what is that torch? Briefly speaking. There's more than one of them, you see. There's one in Twister Theory. I don't know what, I don't know who's carrying it on Twister Theory because it's gone. You see, if I'm talking about Twister Theory, there's three versions. You see, there's
No, the answer is it's the pseudo Twister theory and Twister theory and and pseudo Twister theory. OK. And it's pseudo Twister theory done by the mathematicians, which is all positive definite space. Sure. The pseudo Twister done by Ed Whitten and company has got two two time dimensions and two space dimensions. Those are pseudo because the dimension is wrong. Mine has got one time and three space. So I'm calling that the real Twister theory. Now, the number of people using doing real Twister theory is not very big.
What's your advice to students who are getting into the field of theoretical physics and what are your views on academia as it stands now? I think there's probably too much domination by things you do on computers. I'm not quite sure what I mean there.
I don't know. I mean, I don't really, I don't know most of what people do in physics and I can't really comment. So I can't be rude about it. It shouldn't be rude about things. I don't know. Um, I think it's difficult to shake cosmo. I've noticed that in cosmology. You see, this is a scheme. I'm scrolling about CCC now, which is not taken seriously simply because it's too outrageous. It is outrageous. So if somebody had mentioned it to me before I thought about it, I might've thought it's not worth thinking about.
I did even have a session with Stephen Hawking, me and Stephen and nobody else, and I described CCC to him. I don't know what they thought of me. He came away without saying a word. Though he asked me one question which showed he didn't completely understand what I'd said. So I tried to get that straight. I don't think he believed a word of what I said. What do I do? Well, it's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. I agree with that. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
There's evidence for it and it solves the problem of the specialness of the Big Bang. Nothing else does that I've seen. Now just imagine you're speaking to students and they want to know what advice do you have, sir? I think when people ask me that question, apart from being completely flummoxed, I say do what excites you. I mean you have to concentrate
In doing doing physics or research in general you have to have in your area which you concentrate on but you've also got to have a broader area so it's a bit like a funnel like this you go way down deep in the area you're interested in but you should keep an interest in what's going on all the time as well so don't shut your eyes to what the rest of the world there may you may see a connection which nobody else has spotted thank you sir it's been a pleasure thank you
Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like.
That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, 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, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube
which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes. They disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, 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.
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
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"text": " It's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. What do consciousness, the measurement problem and black holes have in common? With characteristic boldness, Sir Roger Penrose outlines his controversial views on the collapse of the wave function. The Schrodinger equation. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong."
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"text": " the role of gravity in quantum mechanics, the principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity, is in conflict with the principle of superposition and his own radical theory of cyclic cosmology. I don't believe in inflation. That is the idea that our universe evolved from a previous universe and gives rise to another forming an ever-repeating cycle."
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"text": " Penrose doesn't just poke holes in existing theories, he offers ambitious frameworks like twister theory that could potentially unify quantum theory with general relativity. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. This episode was filmed on location at the Math Institute at Oxford, directly after our interview at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. It's a rare in-person glimpse into one of the most influential mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century."
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"text": " Sir Roger Penrose, it's been a long time coming. I've been a huge fan for I think decades, literally decades. Thank you and welcome. My pleasure. Good meeting you at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. Lots of people don't believe some of them. The arts and ideas, what do you mean? Well, the ideas about cosmology, which I have, which are certainly people have a lot of trouble believing them. Even though we have good evidence,"
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"text": " Is that the torch that you want passed on most, the conformal cyclic cosmology? Well, I have a trouble because there's more than one thing. You see, one of the things is Twister Theory and its progeny. There's been a conference. You see, this is taken seriously in the sense that there has been a conference going on all about Twister Theory, not just a conference, but a whole, I think, term, whole term, I think."
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"text": " dedicated to the subject of Twister Theory, which is something which I sort of started in 1963, I think it was, and it's had many developments and many offspring, you might say, and it's spread out to have interests in different areas. Now, it's one of the things that I've been working on for most of my life, and I can't explain it without being a little technical."
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"text": " It's just that... You can feel free to be technical on this podcast. Okay. Which a bit like... Well, Emerson discovered quaternions, which was a way of talking about the geometry of three space. And he introduced this thing called the vector product, which if you have two vectors, well, it's really an algebra of vectors, where you have vectors and scalars mixed together. And if you multiply two vectors,"
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"text": " You have this thing called a cross product, which gives you a third vector. Now, this kind of notion is coming in at a different level with what I call twisters, or now what I call bitwisters. See, the twisters, the subject took ages to develop. As I said, in 1963, when I first had the concept, which, so I gave a talk in Cambridge just recently,"
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"text": " Where I explained the origin of the ideas and there is a certain you might call them slight misconception. There are two different concepts which get confused in Twister theory and these two concepts are positive and negative frequency and positive and negative helicity. And the thing is that the positive negative frequency idea was something that I learned from Engelbert Schucking who was somebody I shared an office with"
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"text": " When I was in a group of people working on general relativity in Syracuse, New York State, in the United States. And there were a lot of people working on relativity theory there. And this is, I think, in 1962. And I learned from Engelbert Schucking two things which I found very interesting. One of them was this question of"
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"text": " what you mean by what's important in quantum field theory and he said the most important thing in quantum field theory is the splitting of field amplitudes into their most positive and negative frequency parts. You keep the positive frequency and you throw away the negative frequency and I thought gosh that's an interesting idea. The other thing he told me was and he told me various things but these were the things of relevance to what I'm saying"
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"text": " The other thing he said was to do with the Maxwell field equations, Maxwell's equations which are very important. They describe electricity, magnetism and light. So it's a theory of light as well as how electric and magnetic fields interrelate to each other. Very beautiful equations which I learned about when I was a graduate student and"
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"text": " I was very keen on the Maxwell equations, especially when you write them in this formalism called two-spinner formalism, which is I can say a bit more about later. But the Maxwell equations, he told me they are conformally invariant, so they only depend on spacetime structure independent of the scaling. So if you magnify the scale up or down, magnify the metric up or down if you like, it makes no difference. That's conformally equivalent."
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"text": " the conformal maps are ones or the conformal transformations are ones which can change the scale but they don't change the well they don't change the light cones in spectral relativity terms so the speed of light is the same of course light after all the speed of light is the same when you magnify and the change the scale but the map what struck me about this these two facts that i learned from here is there seem to be a little of a"
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"text": " an impasse between the two. I mean, how do you decide what splitting the positive and negative frequency? You look at the individual frequencies, which means you do a Fourier decomposition and you take each individual Fourier component and you split that into its positive and negative parts. That's not conformally invariant. You do a conformal map for rescaling the Fourier decomposition, just not go into itself. And so I thought it would be lovely to have a way of looking at this, which is"
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"text": " They come together and you don't have this sort of impasse between the two. Well, I was aware, I don't know whether I was told or I thought about it myself, I was aware of the fact that if you take the field of complex numbers, fold them up into a sphere, so you've got a point at infinity as well, and you take the real numbers and think of that as the equator. So the real numbers go around the equator and the complex numbers go up and down."
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"text": " and if you have a function which is defined on the equator which extends into one hemisphere, that's positive frequency, it extends into the other hemisphere, it's negative frequency. This is a completely conformally invariant description. You can formally invariant the sphere and it doesn't change the splitting into two halves. So I wanted a way of doing this but globally for space-time. So for the whole space-time"
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"text": " I wanted it to be somehow that the real spacetime is the boundary between two extensions into the complex. But if you just complexify spacetime, make all your coordinates complex, you get an eight-dimensional space, not a five-dimensional space. That's no good. It doesn't put it into two halves at all. You get a thing called the forward tube, which is a tiny thing at one side."
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"text": " What was i doing it didn't seem to have any rational reason for looking at this it did seem to me there ought to be a way of exploiting this"
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"text": " Beautiful way in which you do the positive negative frequency without having to look at the Fourier components individually It's a deeper concept if you like and it's also conformally invariant of a scale business that Maxwell theory has you don't lose that Okay, well I had this sort of going around in my mind and didn't know what to do about it It was a rather it was a very unfortunate occasion because I was in Texas in Austin, Texas"
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"text": " And I was working with various colleagues in Austin, Texas. Engelbert Schucking was running this particular meeting. It was a year long meeting where people like Roy Kerr, Ray Sachs were there too. And very distinguished people working in relativity theory. And there were also people in Dallas, Texas. And one of them in particular was somebody I was collaborating on a book. I think I was doing it at that time on spinners."
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"text": " And this was Wolfgang Grünberg. And Ivor Robinson, who was also, he was somebody who was a very clever fellow, had wonderful ideas. He never wrote anything down. He relied on getting a co-author to write the paper. It was all done with words. He had a wonderful way with words. The Americans loved him because he spoke in this way that they weren't used to, which the words all fitted together in this beautiful way."
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"text": " Yes, he did have a wonderful way with words. There's no doubt about it. Was he the one that didn't write papers? Yes. Well, he was important in another story, which is a different story with my story, namely the singularity theorem, because that was walking down the streets and crossing the road. That's a different story. It was the same person that was that was Ivo Robinson. Yes. So he obviously was somebody who could take my attention."
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"text": " but what he had told me about was he'd found some solutions of Maxwell's equations which had a very special character. They're what are called null. They have point in one direction, you see. Usually there you have these two directions which are called principal null directions on the light cone. They're light directions and if they coincide it's what's called null and these are more like radiation fields and he found a beautiful family of solutions"
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"index": 28,
"start_time": 768.968,
"text": " which he constructed in the following strange way. You take a light ray, one light ray, and you take all the light waves which meet it. When I say a light ray, I mean the trajectory of a photon. So in space-time, it's the space-time picture of a photon as thought of as a particle. So now if you think of one light ray and you look at all the light waves which meet it coming in, then you have a family of light rays. And then you construct the solution which is based on those light rays."
},
{
"end_time": 827.381,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 798.268,
"text": " Now they have this awkward singularity, which is the light way that they meet. Why is that a singularity? Well, they all start coming together and so they're not, the nature of the solution is different when they come together. Okay, but it's of a different sort of singularity than the singularity theorem. It's not a serious singularity. It's a singularity in the Maxwell. I think things become infinite. I see. I don't remember the details of it. Sure. They just become infinite on that solution. Just because the light rays don't make this nice family anymore, they got crunched up on the other light ray."
},
{
"end_time": 851.084,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 828.029,
"text": " But what Ivor Robinson did, he had this clever trick where you just place the light ray into the complex, make it a complex light ray, then you can keep the light waves which meet it. There's a family which is still real. So you can see those real ones, even though the one they meet is in the complex. And they twist around each other in this wonderful configuration."
},
{
"end_time": 873.78,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 851.408,
"text": " I thought about this before and I think I knew in detail what this configuration was. It corresponds to what's called Clifford parallels. Clifford parallels are a beautiful geometrical configuration. If you take a three sphere, so that's an ordinary sphere but in four dimensions, so that's a"
},
{
"end_time": 901.493,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 875.179,
"text": " So it's a three-dimensional surface in four dimensions. So it's a family of points which have the same distance from the origin in four Euclidean dimensions. I'm not talking about spacetime now. That four Euclidean dimensions. So we have a three sphere and there's this beautiful family of circles which fill the whole three sphere. No two of them intersect and they all link each other. It's called Clifford parallels or"
},
{
"end_time": 927.398,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 901.903,
"text": " It has a name, which is the topological people like better. Well, it's, it's, it's called the fibrations. Right. And, um, it's a sphere's worth of circles. It's a, it's a very nice example of a fiber bundle and how you, you have this diagram that people like to draw where you have the fiber, which is the circle and the bundle, the entire bundle is the sphere."
},
{
"end_time": 957.654,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 927.739,
"text": " And the projection down is a two-sphere. So each circle corresponds to a point on the two-dimension, an ordinary two-sphere, an ordinary sphere. So the points, each point corresponds to a circle. So it's a beautiful example of a fiber bundle. It's the most simple and beautiful example you can have in a way. I was well aware of it. I just liked the geometry. I found it was really elegant. And it's the same kind of thing you get with these, except that now you're talking about light rays. So if you think of the light rays"
},
{
"end_time": 987.108,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 958.695,
"text": " Not sure quite the easiest way to say this is. It's now the circles correspond to each point of the Clifford 3 sphere corresponds to a light ray. And the whole family of them twists around in this complicated way. So I'm familiar with this configuration and that this was a sort of way of thinking about a complex light ray. You push into the complex and you get this real description of it."
},
{
"end_time": 1012.961,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 987.449,
"text": " which somehow feels out this complex light ray, but only in this real configuration that you can visualize. So I found this very beautiful. Now, is this any use to me? Well, the occasion that I'm talking about here was a particular occasion, which was maybe in a sense the most significant thought which I had had, which was"
},
{
"end_time": 1041.886,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1014.462,
"text": " Well, there was an event, you see, a very unfortunate event, when Kennedy was assassinated. And this was in 1963. And it was in Dallas. And my Dallas colleagues, including Wolfgang Rindler and Ivo Robinson and other people there, Oschwarz, Pitchto Oschwarz was there. And they were at a dinner. And they"
},
{
"end_time": 1072.227,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1042.449,
"text": " Kennedy was supposed to go and give a talk at the dinner and he was awfully late and they sort of joked, well maybe somebody shot him. Somebody had shot him. And they came and it was a way of, someone said they came, it was just about a week later I think when we decided to go to southern Texas to go to a nice place where there was a beach and people could relax and try and recover from this awful occasion. And"
},
{
"end_time": 1101.34,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1072.329,
"text": " and do some math. So we went down there. I didn't think we'd talk much maths. I don't remember. But I remember coming back and most of the people wanted to talk gossip with each other, including my then wife. They really wanted to gossip. I wasn't interested in the gossip. I just wanted some peace. I was the one who was committed, more or less committed to be in the car driven by Piszta Osváth. Now the thing about Piszta Osváth, he was a Hungarian."
},
{
"end_time": 1128.2,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1101.732,
"text": " who did speak English, but he didn't like to speak even in Hungarian. I think he didn't like speaking. He was a silent person. Okay. He was the Hungarian direct. Yes, but he was definitely, he could speak English with a strong Hungarian accent. Sure. And, uh, he was the driver of the car. Okay. And so this was very nice for me because I didn't have to make up conversation to speak to him. He preferred not to have conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 1151.51,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1128.66,
"text": " So I think to myself, I knew about this Robinson-Congrens of rays, which sort of describe a light ray, but which has been displaced in this way. And I said, the thing to do is to count, and I thought I didn't say anything, to count the number of degrees of freedom this configuration has. How much freedom does it have? And I counted them and it has six degrees of freedom."
},
{
"end_time": 1180.06,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1152.125,
"text": " And that's significant because? Yes, this is very significant because light rays themselves have five degrees of freedom. So it's only one. You make your light ray complex in a sense, and you only drop your dimensionality by one. It's not really what you do if you're complex around light. We have five complex dimensions. No, no, this only gives it drops it by one. Why is that so important to me? Because this gives me a picture"
},
{
"end_time": 1209.326,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1180.316,
"text": " The light rays themselves are represented by points on this bound three, sorry, this five dimensional boundary. And the Robinson congruences, as I call them, these these twisting congruences of light rays represent the points. If they go right handed, they're one side. And if they go left handed, they're other side. This is the splitting of the space into two halves. Just what I was looking for. Only it does it globally for the whole of space time."
},
{
"end_time": 1235.862,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1209.514,
"text": " Don't think of points, think of light rays. And then the complex ones in this strange, contorted sense are only one more dimension. So that was the origin of Twister theory. I went back, got him back much earlier than anybody else because they were still gossiping, I guess. And I went to the, I had a blackboard there and I worked it out in terms of two component spinners."
},
{
"end_time": 1266.305,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1236.323,
"text": " And it worked beautifully. And this was Twister's. You take two two-component spinners, the way you can think of it, see a two-component spinner ordinarily points along the light cone. It's like a light, it has a null vector associated with it, and that null vector points along the light cone. In addition, there's a little flag plane, and the flag plane tells you its phase. So the length of the, not the length, but the sort of extent of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1291.937,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1266.817,
"text": " The extent of a null vector gives you one scale and the other scale is the phase, which is the little flag plane. So you have this nice geometrical way, apart from the sine, which you have to add in addition, you've got the nice way of describing two component spinors. I was well familiar with that. So the thing about the twisters, as you can think of the light ray, where does it hit the light cone of the origin at some point?"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.053,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1292.602,
"text": " Then you look at the light ray going up that hits that point. That's a thing I called omega. I didn't call it omega at the time, but it's to do with angular momentum, really. It's the moment of the light ray about the origin. And the other is pi. That's the momentum of the photon. So you've got the momentum and the moment. And the two two-component spinors, they give you a four-dimensional entity. This was a twister. So that was the origin of twister theory."
},
{
"end_time": 1349.377,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1320.026,
"text": " I tried to talk about it to my colleagues there. None of them were interested. Engelbert was. He was the only one that was at all interested in what I'd done. So it was a little bit over. Why weren't they interested? Because it wasn't gender relativity. 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."
},
{
"end_time": 1376.118,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1350.794,
"text": " I didn't know how to do general relativity with twisters. It took me decades to find out how to do general relativity with twisters. Do you think twisters will be an ingredient in a theory of everything? So something that combines the standard model? It certainly should have a much broader application. But you see what you have to do is take another step, which I sort of made a couple of years ago, made it in a slightly different way."
},
{
"end_time": 1406.596,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1377.056,
"text": " Well, it was a couple of years ago, yeah, but it was in a slightly different way about six years ago, because I wrote an article then which wasn't published too much later. But the article I wrote more recently was in honor of CN Yang, the great physicist, one of the people who got a Nobel Prize for weak interactions and their chirality, right, light ref, right. I mean, it's quite curious because of that too. You see, you have the chirality. See, when I say it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1436.954,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1407.227,
"text": " The twister has a chirality to it automatically, which is the way it's just described. If you, if you, if you reflect it, it's really goes into something else. It goes into a dual twister. So you have a twister, which is a four complex dimensional space, vector space, if you like, the dual of that space is the opposite twist. So you have a twister and a dual twister and they twist the opposite way, roughly speaking."
},
{
"end_time": 1467.415,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1437.927,
"text": " But this was all to do with, I was trying to do positive and negative helicity. I learnt not too long after this that you can describe momentum and angular momentum in terms of twisters very nicely. And the null ones, if you're talking about light rays, this is just a twister, basically. It's a twister and a dual twister together. But the nice thing, you can describe the angular momentum. This is the notation I use later to call"
},
{
"end_time": 1493.456,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1468.063,
"text": " Moment and angular momentum thing that's the omega and the momentum is the other one which is the pi part and that's just the splitting which gives you this these two interpretations for the two parts you have two two components windows and they give you these two parts it's also conformally invariant the conformal transformations work beautifully conformal invariance it got more mixed up with"
},
{
"end_time": 1518.643,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1493.916,
"text": " Positive and negative helicity. You see, what you really see is that the twister, the positive and negative, you have the space, which is split into two halves. The space, incidentally, is a well-known space to geometers. It's a complex projective three space. So it's a sixth real dimensional space, which is really complex three dimensional space."
},
{
"end_time": 1547.329,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1518.899,
"text": " So it's nice to visualize because you just think of it as three dimensions and you say, well, it's really complex, too. So you can visualize lots of things in that. And it's really six real dimensions and the five dimensions go either up or down depending upon what is it that's positive or negative. Well, you look at it was took a lot of time to analyze this. But when you really see its connection with angular momentum and so on, it really is a helicity. So it's to do with the photon is rotating."
},
{
"end_time": 1576.237,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1547.807,
"text": " So twisters are inherently chiral? They're inherently chiral. So that this was where it was, I talked about helicity, that's what it was at that time, whereas the intention was this should be positive negative frequency. So the whole subject kind of got mired, in my view, with this confusion. And it got particularly so when one started to talk about general relativity"
},
{
"end_time": 1605.981,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1576.749,
"text": " And there were some ideas which came from Ted Newman, who was a close colleague of mine, and he was interested in making space time a little complex and looking at angular momentums, things which come from your displacements to the complex. It was a very deep insight that he had there. And I realized that that was the sort of thing I was doing. And one of his ideas, I won't go into the details. I realized you could take this and talk about them in twister terms."
},
{
"end_time": 1636.527,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1606.561,
"text": " And this described a kind of twister, which a twister, which actually referred to a curved space time. Okay. Wait, when you say you talked about them in twister terms, what do you mean? Does the complex space time in twister terms? Yes, it is a complex space time. And you see Ted Newman didn't mind about his space time, not being directly physical. I don't know whether he minded or not. He called it H space. He had a space construction, which involved making space time complex."
},
{
"end_time": 1662.585,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1636.834,
"text": " I'm looking at it in this particular way that he did. So why was that interesting to you? Because when we've talked off air, if I mentioned the word supersymmetry, there's a grimace on your face. Yes. I mentioned string theory because it has extra dimensions and maybe some other flavors. There's an even worse grimace. I can tell you where the grimace comes from. See, all these things are adding extra dimensions to space time."
},
{
"end_time": 1688.319,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1663.353,
"text": " Now what I was doing was absolutely crucially tied to the space timing having three space and one time dimension. If you change that, you wreck the theory. So some people see a theory that works in n dimensions, especially mathematicians, that's a feature that it can work in any dimension. And if you say my theory only works in four dimension, some people see that as a weakness. You see that as no, that's a strength. Absolutely."
},
{
"end_time": 1718.78,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1689.36,
"text": " That is absolutely the point. I'm seeing it as a strength because you're not looking at mathematics. Okay. Mathematics did pick up, mathematicians pick up on twisted theory and they generalize it to higher dimensions and all sorts of things. Fine. That's good. That's good stuff, but it's pure mathematics. I'm interested here in specifically the mathematics, which applies to the physical world. Now that whether you can generalize that to 17 dimensions is of no particular interest to me. And if people do string theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 1748.114,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1719.087,
"text": " Initially, when I heard about string theory, I thought it was a beautiful idea. And then when it went and said, oh, no, it only works in, I think, 26 dimensions originally, I thought, okay, that's not okay. You can work on that. I'm not going to work on that. It's not physics anymore. So you mentioned C and Yang, you mentioned fiber bundles and implicitly hopfibrations. Those are differential geometric ideas. And the standard model and general relativity are based in differential geometry. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1776.954,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1748.507,
"text": " Standard model is not even differential geometry, it's really flat space time really. Do you see differential geometry as what will be the language of physics in the next few decades or do you think you started off in algebraic geometry? Do you see algebraic as the chopped liver that should be? You're talking about my shady history here. Now it is true that when I went to Cambridge... I'm going to ask about growth in Deakson. Don't, but you can if you like."
},
{
"end_time": 1803.831,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1777.705,
"text": " But all I'm saying, yes, you see, when I was in Cambridge doing algebra geometry, I was trying to solve a problem that my supervisor, William Hodge, suggested. He had given a list of problems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, you can work on any of these. And I didn't understand any of them. Oh, the bottom one I can understand. Yeah, I'll try that one."
},
{
"end_time": 1833.797,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1804.872,
"text": " I think suspect it was the one that he was least interested in. I'm not sure. I think he was quite interested in it, but it was not part of the march of algebraic geometry and what my close colleague at that time, Michael Atiyah, would have been doing. He was the real expert on these things. I mean, all these things are driven by anecdotes, I'm afraid. Hodge suggested at one time, there were various people in my group,"
},
{
"end_time": 1858.916,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1834.189,
"text": " And for one reason or another, I didn't connect with what I was doing. But he suggested, well, maybe not so keen, Hodges suggesting, maybe you're not so keen on the subject. I was expressing some disappointment with it. I think it's OK. But maybe you prefer to work on one of the other topics. You might like to sit in on one of the other graduate students sitting on. So I did. I sat in on this class."
},
{
"end_time": 1888.302,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1859.48,
"text": " And I didn't understand a single word that went on. It was way above anything I knew at all. And I thought, this graduate student, if they're all like that, what am I doing here? What I didn't realize is that graduate student was Michael Atiyah. Michael Atiyah was later to become a Fields Medalist, become one of the first winners of the, there's another prize, mathematics prize, the Dirac Medal."
},
{
"end_time": 1917.585,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1888.387,
"text": " No, no, it's a play on Nobel, but it's somebody else. Arbel Prize. That's right. The Arbel Prize. He was one of the earliest winners of the Arbel Prize and he became president of the Royal Society. Anyway, he was obviously not your average student. That's what I mean. The fact that he sort of and he became very important in my life later on by telling me that things I was trying to do were really cohomology."
},
{
"end_time": 1944.104,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1917.927,
"text": " which I had no knowledge about. When I found this way of doing integrals for finding, yes, I was interested in this, just what I was trying to say in a way, the solutions that Ted Newman had found, and I tried to convert them into Twister theory, which I realized you could do in a way, but by making Twister theory curved. And you can make it curved provided"
},
{
"end_time": 1971.817,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1944.394,
"text": " You don't have any what I've later called alpha planes. I mean, when you don't have beta, you have alpha planes. I've got to set it the wrong way. As long as you have alpha planes. Alpha planes are things which can only exist if half of the conformal curvature vanishes. When I say half, it's a bit difficult to do that in space-time for space because the signature is wrong. You can do it for the kinds of space"
},
{
"end_time": 2000.572,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1972.705,
"text": " Geometry is for geometries that mathematicians like because the signature is right for them. You have got all pluses. You take your metric. It's all got pluses and they like that and that gives you a nice theory and you can make that what's called anti-self dual. If the vial curvature, that's the conformal curvature, it splits into two parts. Make one part zero and the other part still exists and you get these curved solutions."
},
{
"end_time": 2029.974,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 2001.442,
"text": " If you try to do that with spacetimes, and if they were real spacetimes, you can't, well you can, but it doesn't get you very far, because the Vierkerve to the two parts, one is the complex conjugate of the other. So if one of them is zero, the other one is zero. So it's not, it's conformally flat. It's not interesting as a conformal manifold. However, Ted Newman didn't worry about these things. That was my Pittsburgh colleague who I"
},
{
"end_time": 2057.858,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 2030.708,
"text": " did a lot of work with. He was a very inspirational, inspiring character, and he had this idea of sort of complexifying space in a way which was sort of half doing it. And in that half doing it way, you could see that you could do what I was trying to do. And this led to what I would refer to later as the nonlinear graviton. It's this complex space-time"
},
{
"end_time": 2083.353,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2058.387,
"text": " for which this vial curvature part does vanish. And so you can do Twister theory in it. In this complex space time, you say, what's it good for in physics? Ah, well, what's complex naturally in physics? Wave functions. So if you're doing complex stuff, you could be doing quantum theory. So this could be a wave function of a crazy sort. So it's what I used to call a nonlinear graviton."
},
{
"end_time": 2107.142,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2084.155,
"text": " So it's the wave function of a graviton, but it's not the ordinary linear wave function. You see, normal quantum mechanics is linear. You can add one wave function to another. And the whole point about, well, not the whole point, but the big point about quantum mechanics is that you have the superposition principle. You can add states together. The wave functions is a linear thing. You can add them."
},
{
"end_time": 2135.538,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2108.251,
"text": " Now this thing was a nonlinear thing. You can't add one solution to another. It's just a solution. It's a complex solution of the vacuum Einstein equations which has this twist to it and the viral curvature vanishes and you have twisters. The kind of twisters you have are a new kind which are curved. So you can have these curved twisters. It makes sense. However it's a bit stuck"
},
{
"end_time": 2163.626,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2135.998,
"text": " If you want to have your physics out of it, because it's to do with this conflict or confusion, I would say, in twisted theories, inbuilt into the whole subject. You see, positive and negative frequency is what I was striving for, and I sort of haven't got to that because I got a little confused in my discussion here. But you see, it does turn out to do positive and negative frequency. It took a long time for me to see that."
},
{
"end_time": 2189.821,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2163.985,
"text": " I was driven to positive and negative helicity. They could see that almost directly. The photons twist one way or the other way. And that's what classical twister theory does for you. But then if you start to do integrals and things like that, you can see it's a little bit more confused. And then you can see these integral things you're doing are really wave functions. And if they're wave functions, then they can have positive and negative separately frequency. The right handed"
},
{
"end_time": 2217.056,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2190.128,
"text": " They can be right-handed or left-handed, depending on whether it's twisters or dual twisters, and they can be positive frequency as well. But you've got to talk to them about complex solutions. So it's this confusion between the two which, in a sense, limited twister theory to the situations in which you have alpha planes. Now, I haven't said what an alpha plane is, but these are integral. The vanishing of this half of the vial curvature"
},
{
"end_time": 2246.578,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2217.432,
"text": " is the integrability condition for the existence of alpha planes. So that if you have the alpha planes, they are the twisters. So if your plane has alpha planes, each alpha plane is associated with a twister. And that's the geometrical description. But real space time doesn't have any alpha planes in it. Only much more recently, I considered what you do. You consider what I call by twisters. Now, by twisters, I described in the paper"
},
{
"end_time": 2274.497,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2247.295,
"text": " Which was in honor of CN Yang. It's very much delayed with this paper because I was trying to work things out and it came out, but it's in honor of CN Yang's 100th birthday, I should say. He's still alive as far as I'm aware. This was two years ago or something. So it came out. So I wrote this paper, which was about Biotwisters and about the connection with split Octonians. So I mentioned right at the beginning, the"
},
{
"end_time": 2304.821,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2274.957,
"text": " The Hamiltonian quaternions. Right. And you have the analog of that. When you go up, these are things called octonians. It didn't take long after Hamiltonian produces quaternions and various several people independently discovered this generalization to these eight dimensional things, which are called octonians. I was aware of the octonians and I was aware that there were split ones as well, where you have four plus signs and four minus signs. And I thought maybe there's something to do with Twister theory there."
},
{
"end_time": 2333.609,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2305.128,
"text": " I didn't know what it was. That was just a hunch at that point. Well, this was what this paper was really the result, because I could see how to do it. You can actually describe the split octonians. You have to have a product. Now, going back to what I said at the beginning, quaternions, you take two product to two gives you a third. Now it's a product of three things give you a fourth. You make one that you choose another element, make it the unit element. And then this other two gives you the split octonian product."
},
{
"end_time": 2358.473,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2334.241,
"text": " So it does give you the split octonians. I only vaguely thought maybe there's some connection at one time and later I say it really does. It gives you the split octonians. But for that you really need these things called bitwisters. You've got to combine a twister and a dual twister. Otherwise these things don't even exist. There's got to be that combination and you have a bigger space."
},
{
"end_time": 2388.473,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2359.36,
"text": " But what's nice about it from the physics point of view is you sort of got rid of this inherent twist into the theory. They're not really twisters in the sense that the twist goes one way rather than the other. So it removes this awkward confusion between helicity and frequency. It's the positive frequency and positive helicity. Helicity are two different concepts, but in Twister theory they can fuse as being the same."
},
{
"end_time": 2409.889,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2388.933,
"text": " So I want to ask about definitions because when you're an undergrad, people tend to think that you focus on proofs and that's what it is to be a researcher. And Grothendieck said that what's more important are definitions. So he would say you keep your definitions convoluted and you make your proof simple. What makes a good definition in physics though?"
},
{
"end_time": 2438.473,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2410.759,
"text": " We're going back to Grotendieck. You see, when I was talking about my period in Cambridge, I was really an outsider working on this particular problem that Hodges suggested, although it was a bit like Twister theory in a way. You see, if you want to describe a curve and a twisted cubic is a good example. You don't have one equation for it. You can think of it as an intersection of two quadrics where you throw away a line. The normal intersection is a quadric, quartic surface. You may specialize it so"
},
{
"end_time": 2467.056,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2438.831,
"text": " It's a line and a cubic, and that cubic is called a twisted cubic. It's not the intersection of two hyper surfaces. But can you write down an equation for it? Yes, you can. You think of your space of straight lines and those straight lines which meet the curve is one condition, and that gives you a form. And this is the Cayley form thing. And that's what I was actually working on. Not that, but how do you do that in higher dimensions? How do you work out how things intersect and stuff like that?"
},
{
"end_time": 2494.923,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2468.166,
"text": " It got rather too messy. So I had to develop a diagrammatic notation for handling all the complications. That's another story too. I won't tell you that one now, but anyway, um, growth and deke growth and deke was the big high priest of all. I think initially it was sort of craps up before you got to growth and he was the real high priest. And, and that's what people like a tear were doing. And,"
},
{
"end_time": 2516.834,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2495.435,
"text": " making it more and more abstract as you went on. I was going on a completely different route. I was thinking about something concrete. Well, it was much more concrete. Yes. I mean, I could think of light rays meeting curves, not light rays, straight lines meeting curves. That was my problem with that character. But you do that in higher dimensions."
},
{
"end_time": 2538.336,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2517.022,
"text": " Yeah, there's a phrase abstract nonsense. Have you heard of that about category theory? That's that's right. That's that's the whole that's your feeling as a whole move. You see that? Yeah, that's what they were all doing. To this day. That's what Michael Michael it was a great expert in that subject. Oh, yeah. And Groton Dieck was a greater expert. What he what was there was a sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 2567.193,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2539.394,
"text": " Sure. What do you see as the tension between gravity and quantum mechanics? So you mentioned linear. Some people think one is nonlinear and the other is linear and that's where the tension is. Some people say it's non-commuting variables on one side and then commuting variables on the other. There is a big tension. Observable, sorry. But there's a worse tension."
},
{
"end_time": 2596.749,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2567.637,
"text": " You see, there's a tension in the sense that general relativity is not really linear. It's non-linear, you see. And people like in quantum mechanics, they like linear things. They don't care how many dimensions it is. It could be a million dimensions. It could be infinite number of dimensions. Lots of things are. They love infinite dimensions. That's fine in quantum theory. But space-time has got three plus one. From that point of view, it's pretty boring. It's only got a finite number of dimensions."
},
{
"end_time": 2625.879,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2597.756,
"text": " The space-time has, and Einstein of course, well he was a good, he got his Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics of course, but the photoelectric effect was just nothing to do with GR. But he was, some people like, some physicists even, like to say Einstein was wrong. They like to tout that, they like to write that on a t-shirt. Well they were all saying that then. You see that was nothing new in those days. Einstein's generally, well I know he was,"
},
{
"end_time": 2654.309,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2626.51,
"text": " Of course, it was the Eddington expedition, which suddenly startled everybody to show the bending of light was in agreement with Einstein's theory. And that did change things. It made Einstein a big celebrity, too. I'm sure it was a big thing, but it didn't really make the quantum field quantum field theory of quantum people didn't like curved spaces because they're all flat spaces. They may have infinite dimensions, but they're flat as a pancake."
},
{
"end_time": 2681.937,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2654.94,
"text": " They don't fit in very well with the basis of general relativity. And then perhaps you want me to go in that other route because there's another way they don't fit in together, which is another thing. It's not so much Twister theory as it stands, but it's an important thing. Consciousness? Collapse? Collapse. Yes, there's consciousness, but that's our idea."
},
{
"end_time": 2712.022,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2682.551,
"text": " There are too many stories here. We're going to talk about consciousness as well. Let's stick with the collapse for now. No, the collapse is important. We have to do that first anyway. You see, I always thought that I didn't like the collapse of the wave function as being, I mean, quantum theory was terribly confused. You see, you've got the beautiful, well, think of the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger was confused. I mean, he understood why he was confused. I mean, he was absolutely on the ball."
},
{
"end_time": 2740.998,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2712.568,
"text": " But lots of people were confused. Anyway, let me not go into that story. You say take a quantum system. How do you describe it? You take the wave function or vector in Hilbert space or something, the wave function, take the wave function. How does that evolve in time? Schrodinger equation. So it evolves in time, according to Schrodinger equation. Is that the way the world evolves in time? No, it doesn't, because you cheat. You say, no, no, you've got to a certain point and you"
},
{
"end_time": 2770.333,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2741.988,
"text": " Make a measurement. What does making a measurement mean? I don't know. People have funny ideas about making a measure. The trouble is the word observation, I think, crept in there a little too... Too sneakily, too early? Too sneakily, too strongly, I would say. Because people think as many, one of the big proponents of this view was Vigna, Eugene Vigna. And I actually, when I was in Princeton, I did talk to Vigna about it."
},
{
"end_time": 2800.384,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2770.998,
"text": " I had a long lunch talk with him and I talked about this issue of consciousness, if you like, collapse the wave function because that was the Vigna view. He was not so dogmatic about that view as I was expecting. He was saying it's a view, but I don't think for many reasons it really makes sense. But it was nevertheless, I think a lot of people, even von Neumann seemed to have that sort of idea too. A lot of people had the idea"
},
{
"end_time": 2829.206,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2800.862,
"text": " That it was a conscious being observing the system, which somehow changes the rules. You change your wave function and write it down in terms of its certain basis. And then you give the amplitudes and then you look at these complex amplitudes, square them, square the modulus and that makes your probabilities. So then what would they say, not to take you off track, but what would they say is that what observes the observer?"
},
{
"end_time": 2858.695,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2830.077,
"text": " And I don't say any of that, you see. I don't care what they say. I don't know what they say because it's not what I say. And I think it's wrong. So although I think consciousness has relates to it question, it's in a completely different way. It's not what collapses the wave function. What collapses the wave function is physics. So there is something in physics which collapses the wave function. The Schrodinger equation quantum theory as a whole is wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 2881.715,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2859.974,
"text": " It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. Now I say this very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. I mean, Einstein and Schrodinger are much more polite. They said it was incomplete. Okay, incomplete means wrong. Well, you're telling it like it is. Yeah, you've got to change it. So it's wrong. But"
},
{
"end_time": 2908.848,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2882.108,
"text": " Incomplete is a more polite way of saying it's wrong. Okay, they're fine. I should be polite sometimes to quantum mechanics, although it's pretty robust as it is. It doesn't mind people like me being rude to it. But anyway, so Einstein and Schrodinger both thought that it was wrong, that the theory needed some amendment, could be an important amendment, which changes the nature of the whole subject, quite likely."
},
{
"end_time": 2921.237,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2909.258,
"text": " As you know, on theories of everything, we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies to stay informed."
},
{
"end_time": 2947.432,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2921.305,
"text": " in an ever-evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting on the exact topics explored here and even more. The Economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments, whether it's the latest in scientific innovation or the shifting tectonic plates of global politics. The Economist provides comprehensive coverage"
},
{
"end_time": 2975.794,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2947.432,
"text": " that goes beyond the headlines. What sets the economists apart is their ability to make complex issues accessible and engaging, much like we strive to do in this podcast. If you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. It's an investment into intellectual growth, one that you won't regret. As a listener of Toe, you get a special 20% off discount."
},
{
"end_time": 2991.408,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2975.794,
"text": " Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less. Head over to their website www.economist.com totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in and now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 3019.206,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2992.125,
"text": " Could be an important amendment which changes the nature of the whole subject, quite likely. So you think both Einstein's both general relativity and quantum mechanics need to be modified or primarily quantum mechanics and a tinge to general relativity? I would say more importantly quantum mechanics. You see, people sometimes say to combine these two great theories, you've got to quantize general relativity. Can you explain what does it mean to quantize?"
},
{
"end_time": 3048.899,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3019.36,
"text": " You mean to haul it into the framework of quantum theory. So you have, you make it into a Hilbert space and operators and goodness knows what. And you sum over metrics or sum over geometry. Lots of people were trying to, Wheeler was trying to do that when I was in Princeton. Yeah. Lots of people were trying to do that. Bryce DeWitt was certainly trying to do that. And so when you speak to string theorists, they would say, well, that's quite obviously the approach where the only finite quantum gravity game in town. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 3079.104,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3049.531,
"text": " I mean, there's nothing wrong with quantizing gravity. It's just the weak. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't read the right adjective, but let me... You don't have to be polite anymore. No, no, I'm not going to be polite here. I'm trying to be more illustrative, what I mean. I mean, I sometimes talk about a space, a planet, a distant planet, which has an atmosphere on it, just like it's a planet very much like the Earth, almost identical."
},
{
"end_time": 3105.196,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3079.753,
"text": " There's a space probe going out to look at it because it's very interesting. However, there is no life on it. No life has ever evolved on it. There are no butterflies to flap their wings and weather is supposed to be a chaotic thing and so even sensitive to the flapping of a butterfly's wing. There aren't any butterflies on this planet. There are no conscious beings on that planet."
},
{
"end_time": 3132.773,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3105.452,
"text": " So all the different weathers that they might have on that planet are all co-exist in superposition. It's a mess. The probe is going out to take a photo, takes a photograph of this mess. It comes back to the Earth and when it's within distance of being able to send signals to the Earth, somebody's sitting against the screen and finally the first picture of the weather on that planet, this person looks at it, snap!"
},
{
"end_time": 3159.326,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3133.677,
"text": " His consciousness or her consciousness makes that world into weather, into one weather. What could be more absurd? Absolutely ridiculous. It's lightweight and where it doesn't have any interest in us. Why does its weather become one? Just because this chap's been taking a photograph of it. Absolute nonsense. I'm just trying to emphasize that I don't believe it is consciousness that collapses the wave function."
},
{
"end_time": 3182.108,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3159.753,
"text": " Instead, it's the collapse of the wave function that produces consciousness. Well, that's my other story, which I think is is another story. And it's a story which I also tried to pursue to some degree. I don't regard this as what I do most in my life, because I is too much biology and things like that, which I don't know anything about. Are you headed to microtubules being the"
},
{
"end_time": 3200.23,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3182.415,
"text": " mechanism or the place are you just saying look if it's going to occur needs to occur somewhere in the brain this chap names steward hammer off put up his hand and say it could be microtubules i found this in the brain and then you said okay well maybe that's more lesson yeah yes it wasn't quite like that"
},
{
"end_time": 3230.299,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3200.52,
"text": " But I do think microtubules are a good candidate for various reasons. But you wouldn't be heartbroken if it turned out to be some other structure. Heartbroken is too strong. I'd be a bit disappointed, yes. Oh. Because I think microtubules... No, there are various features of microtubules that I find fascinating. I don't think it's a coincidence. Did you see the recent news about the superradiance in microtubules? I did hear something. I didn't see it. Was that on the... It said that there are quantum effects that are coherent in microtubules."
},
{
"end_time": 3256.084,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3230.589,
"text": " Do you feel vindicated from that? The trouble is I did look at the paper which was referred, I think if it's the same one you're talking about, I did look at the paper. Stuart is mentioned, there is a reference to this, but it doesn't really talk about his stuff. It looks like something else. I don't know, I might be connected. Look, I'm not a biologist, so I'm not even a chemist."
},
{
"end_time": 3284.838,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3256.766,
"text": " I find chemists too difficult for chemistries. It's full of words that I can't remember. Yeah, same. I was supposed to be a doctor. My parents were both doctors. They thought I should be a doctor. They were both medically trained. I was the one they thought would be the doctor. They won in the end because my little sister eventually got a doctor and she married one too. So they got two for the price of one. No, I disappointed them terribly. I would have been hopeless because I don't remember names these things. You can tell I forget them immediately."
},
{
"end_time": 3299.582,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3285.418,
"text": " Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax."
},
{
"end_time": 3324.991,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3299.991,
"text": " 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": 3353.916,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3326.032,
"text": " So I'm jumping ahead because the audience is familiar with that gravity has something to do with the collapse of the wave function. Let me make that a little more specific. Sure. You see, I wasn't so clear on that until much more later, I think, just a little before the turn of the century. I can't quite remember when. It took me a little while before I actually wrote the paper on it. I wrote a paper on it which was to explain a conflict, that's a conflict,"
},
{
"end_time": 3377.79,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3354.087,
"text": " between the two basic principles, one of general relativity, the other of quantum mechanics. What's the basic principle of general relativity? It's the principle of equivalence, which Einstein admitted. He didn't give Galileo credit. I think he should have given a reference to Galileo. I'm not sure he did because Galileo already noticed"
},
{
"end_time": 3406.92,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3378.387,
"text": " The principle of equivalence. And he talked about, I like the one of the fireworks. He describes his fireworks. Go out and they make this beautiful sphere of sparks. As it falls, it remains a sphere. You can get rid of gravity by free fall, locally. I mean, he's very explicit. Not just the big rocks and the little rocks, why the feather doesn't because of here is a sense and all that. I mean, he was right. But, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3436.596,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3408.063,
"text": " Of course, you needed special relativity and make those into a four-dimensional spacetime, as Minkowski did, and then bend it as Einstein did. So the collapse and gravity come in? Nothing there. But my argument is that the principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity, is in conflict with the principle of superposition. And the argument"
},
{
"end_time": 3465.213,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3437.415,
"text": " is more or less this. I say think of an experiment done in the lab on the tabletop and you want to take the Earth's gravitational field into consideration. Now there are two ways you might do this. The way any sensible physicist would do it, you put a term in the Hamiltonian, if you don't know what that means don't worry, put a term in the Hamiltonian for the gravitational field and just chug away the usual procedures. Fine."
},
{
"end_time": 3495.657,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3466.271,
"text": " Then you notice that Einstein sitting in the corner or Galileo even and tell you, no, no, no, you shouldn't do it that way. The gravitational field of the earth is locally just like free fall. So you can consider your lab, your coordinates are falling and the lab is just accelerating in this thing. And there's no gravitational field. OK, you do it this other way. It's a different way, different coordinates. You do it away and you come up. Eventually you come up with"
},
{
"end_time": 3522.039,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3496.101,
"text": " almost the same answer. The key of course is in the almost. The wave function you get is just the same except for the complex multiplier which people, the phase factor if you like, which people would quite like to discard because when they're going to measure anything that you observe they're taking amplitudes, you take squares and moduli, so you don't worry too much about that."
},
{
"end_time": 3550.162,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3522.705,
"text": " Until you look rather too carefully at this actual factor, which is different between these two procedures, that actual factor involves the time, an exponential of the time cubed. And that is not that serious, if you're really thinking of quantum field theory, that's serious because that's telling you that's a different vacuum. You're actually working in a different vacuum."
},
{
"end_time": 3580.725,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3551.698,
"text": " So you might say, well, you still might say who cares because you say stick to your vacuum and you get the right answer at the end. OK, so I'm going to change the problem a little bit, rather seriously, actually. I'm going to say that in this experiment, there was a lump of some sort. OK, which is put into a superposition of two locations. So it's a little little stone which goes into two places."
},
{
"end_time": 3611.084,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3581.22,
"text": " a little bead or something, which is part of the experiment. Now, I try to use the Einsteinian Galilean Einstein perspective and I ran into trouble because as I get close to the bead, I see that the whether it's here or here, I can't get rid of them both at once. And that's, of course, the Einstein problem, which is a general relativity. I can't get rid of them both at once by free fall. So what do I do? I do what any sensible physicist would do. I cheat."
},
{
"end_time": 3640.93,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3612.09,
"text": " I say okay I know I should be using the Einstein perspective but let's just try instead measure the mistake that I'm making by adopting that by the Newtonian perspective. So I adopt the Newtonian perspective but keep track of what might be a little error in doing it. Then I integrate that error over space and I do a little integration by parts and some little bit of fiddling around with it and I get with"
},
{
"end_time": 3671.032,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3641.613,
"text": " An answer which looks like a uncertainty in the mass of a system. It is the mass of the system, but it's not the fact that it's a superposition. It gives me an uncertainty of that mass. Now I can measure and now the thing is that's a bit like particle physics where you have, if you have a decaying particle, its mass is not completely well defined. It hasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 3699.428,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3671.288,
"text": " an era of fuzziness in its mass, which is given by the Heisenberg time-energy uncertainty principle. So its lifetime, if it's an unstable particle, is inversely related to this sort of fuzziness in its mass. Now here I have a fuzziness in the energy of the system, the mass energy of the system, so I say that's the reciprocal of that in natural units."
},
{
"end_time": 3728.626,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3699.855,
"text": " When I say natural units, I mean making all the things equal to one that you can do, as Dirac sort of pointed out, I guess. And I get the formula, which Deoshi had already discovered a couple of years earlier than me. Right, for different reasons. I didn't know he'd done that. It was a different argument. But I thought this was a nice argument because it just revealed the tension between these two very basic principles. Principles of equivalence"
},
{
"end_time": 3758.217,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3728.916,
"text": " and the principle of superposition. And they're a bit in conflict with each other. And the resolution of this conflict comes through allowing your unstable state to collapse into one or the other. Now, it's what you only get from this way of looking at it is an uncertainty in the mass. And I know that the event's looking directly at this thing rather than looking at the collapse, which is a powerful thing to exploit."
},
{
"end_time": 3786.169,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3758.268,
"text": " And just for people who are wondering about Yvette Fuentes, there's a podcast on screen right now where we go into two hours in depth into this topic. Now, do you have a mechanism for why or how gravity collapses the wave function? Or do you just say it has to collapse? That's where the new theory has to come in. I'm just saying, look, I have a problem. I need a theory. No, all I can say is that it tells me how big the"
},
{
"end_time": 3812.517,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3786.8,
"text": " factor should be. It tells you you can measure this uncertainty and it's not so hard. You just think of the bead that I was looking at. Imagine the two copies of the same bead and I move it into this superposition and I ask how much energy would that cost me where I ignore all forces except gravity. Very tiny usually but nevertheless it's enough to collapse the"
},
{
"end_time": 3843.404,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3813.814,
"text": " It's not a theory in the sense that his was. I mean, I think his ideas got, as far as I'm aware, rather shot down by the Gran Sasso experiments, was it? They took the thing down a mineshaft or something. No, it's to do with the heating. They anticipate bodies spontaneously heat."
},
{
"end_time": 3873.541,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3844.053,
"text": " Which I don't want. That shouldn't happen. But that's because the collapse has a very curious. You see, if you want to make it consistent with special relatively, don't worry about general specific amount. You're really already in trouble because you imagine a body going splitting. It's the superposition. It's not two bodies. It's one body superposition of here and here. They get very far away from each other. They haven't collapsed yet. And now they're going to collapse. One goes in whose frame does that happen?"
},
{
"end_time": 3900.247,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3873.882,
"text": " Is that a frame you should be talking about? How do you make that consistent? Well, what you got to do, I mean, I worried about that. Lots of people seem not to worry about that. I worried about that. You say, okay, the only thing you can do, which is relatively, I mean, there are other wrong routes you can take, which I won't go into because there's quite a bit of a more story than I'm making out here. The only route you can take is to say the collapse actually"
},
{
"end_time": 3930.879,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3901.203,
"text": " took place right back to where the split initially took, and then there was only one route. But what about the other route? Well, what I have to do is to describe things in terms of two different kinds of reality. One of them is quantum reality and one of them is classical reality. So one doesn't give rise to the other? They're actually separate? Well, it's the quantum reality, if you like, which does give rise to the way that the classical reality behaves."
},
{
"end_time": 3959.701,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3931.323,
"text": " But it does it in a kind of retro-causal way. So that's what's so confusing. In a kind of retro-causal way, or is it retro-causal? It's kind of retro-causal. Okay, explain. I'm saying this deliberately because it's only quantum reality. You see, this is a puzzle I think people, it was a puzzle I had, and you can resolve this in a rather peculiar way. You might say, oh sure, if it was retro-causal and it went back to the beginning, then"
},
{
"end_time": 3990.708,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3961.118,
"text": " How do you, what am I trying to say? You can travel faster than light. Yeah, you can travel faster than light or backwards in time or something. Sure. So I've got to tackle that problem or you can signal signal backwards in time. That's the thing. And you were trying to retain a special relativity before because I'm just saying you can't do that because if you think of Alice and Bob, I wish I had this in some notes, which I which I circulated, but I don't think it was actually published. It's sort of pseudo published."
},
{
"end_time": 4017.875,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3991.732,
"text": " You see, I have a book, the book I wrote, which was with the Princeton University Press called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. The fashion was about string theory, which I'm not sure was still so fashionable now, but it was then. Faith was quantum mechanics at all levels. And fantasy actually had to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 4047.602,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4018.166,
"text": " cosmology it was to do with inflationary cosmology because i simply thought inflation is much too fantastic that's another story but the fashion so i had to write this new preface they're going to bring it it's out now i think it's almost out now a new printing of fashion i wasn't allowed to change anything in the book but i was allowed to write a new preface and i do give an outline of this idea i think i do the retrocausal thing you see the thing is think about the the"
},
{
"end_time": 4073.37,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4048.677,
"text": " Standard EPR. So you have a spin zero state splits into two halves, spin half, and Alice takes one off in the spaceship and Bob takes it up on another half. Alice makes a measurement. What do I say happens to the quantum reality? It's a quantum measurement. It propagates, quantum reality propagates along the path like"
},
{
"end_time": 4102.312,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4073.916,
"text": " What could be crazier than that? The backwards way along the past like it hits Bob's world line way earlier than he does his experiment. So his state is already changed into the one which is the opposite of Alice's state. Bob makes his measurement later. He doesn't know what the state is. Alice can only communicate classically with him."
},
{
"end_time": 4130.469,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4102.858,
"text": " This is a quantum information, quantum reality information. Quantum reality, you cannot measure, you can only ascertain. Explain the difference between ascertaining and confirming, because when you were on stage with Sabine Haassenfelder, you said, you can confirm, I think it was the classical level, you can confirm, whereas at the quantum you can ascertain, like you can ask a question. That's right. Well, you see that it is really Einstein,"
},
{
"end_time": 4157.637,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4131.954,
"text": " It's Einstein's fault because he was saying, I think a lot of people were worrying about the reality of the wave function. Is it real? Is it really there? Not real, it's complex, you see. It's not real in the sense of real numbers, but is it really there? And Einstein produced the statement. He said, well, a concept of reality isn't introducing."
},
{
"end_time": 4187.039,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4158.046,
"text": " which is if you can make if there's a measurement you can make on the system without disturbing it and which with hundred percent certainty gives the answer yes then that measurement is revealing an element of reality so he says that the state the quantum state is real in that sense what he didn't say as far as i'm aware is that is quantum reality it's not classical reality think of the spin of a spin half particle"
},
{
"end_time": 4216.954,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4187.432,
"text": " That's I think I always like spin half past. Sure. Simplest thing to say. Spin up and spin down, if you like. Spin right and spin left. Suppose it spin is about that way. If I know through its origin, where did that spin come from? Oh, yes, I know. Oh, it should be spinning that way. Wait, sorry. Is this a hidden variable that it's carrying with it? It's not hidden variables. Forget about BOM. Forget about BOM. I had endless arguments with Basil Haley on that topic."
},
{
"end_time": 4244.07,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4217.329,
"text": " And I prefer not to go back there when I was at Birkbeck College. All right. Let's not talk about hidden variables. If you can call them hidden variables, you can, but that's not my idea. It's not that. Got it. It's quantum reality. So the state is that, but it has a quantum reality of spinning right handed about that particular direction. And we know it is because we've set up and we've produced it in that state."
},
{
"end_time": 4271.869,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4244.462,
"text": " You could do that by some experiment and it comes out in that state. Now, I'm going to use Einstein's criterion. I can measure the spin in that direction using, you know, as long as it's got a magnetic dipole or something, I can measure it and I can every if I've got it right every time I measure it or I can measure the same experiment many times over 100 percent certainly that's real."
},
{
"end_time": 4299.991,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4272.585,
"text": " That's what Einstein said is his element of reality. I'm just slightly modifying what he said. It's an element of quantum reality. It's not classical reality. I can't say to the state, hello state, which way are you pointing? Just looks at you blankly. It says that I don't answer questions like that. Give me a better question. You see, if I say, are you spinning that way? It can say no. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4326.237,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4300.572,
"text": " If you say which way are you spinning, it doesn't answer that question. That's a quantum reality thing. Quantum reality doesn't. You can't ascertain it. That's when I say you can't ascertain. You can't ascertain which way it's spinning. However, you can confirm which way it's spinning by the Einstein criteria. I see. Now if Alice and Bob, you see, if Alice"
},
{
"end_time": 4354.821,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4326.681,
"text": " propagates back in time. Bob's state is already, in a certain sense, the opposite of what Alice is going to measure. But Bob can't ask the state which way you're spinning. If he could, then you could send signals faster than that. The whole of special relativity goes down the tubes. The whole of modern physics does. So that's not a good idea. So quantum reality, sure."
},
{
"end_time": 4382.585,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4355.213,
"text": " Bob can't say. He can ask it. His spinning state says don't ask me such a question. I don't answer questions like that. Suggests a direction. So he does. He suggests a different direction. He has no idea what Alice has spinned. I did worry about this quite a lot by saying can he ascertain which way Alice is measuring it and even if you don't know which answer she gets. So there's a bit of a subtlety there because she might orient her apparatus in some way"
},
{
"end_time": 4407.756,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4383.131,
"text": " And does that information somehow, you want to make sure that can't be ascertained by Bob either. Uh huh. That she's free to choose independently? She's free to choose. She says, yeah, but she might say, Oh, I think I'm going to choose that direction because that Bob's keen on that direction or something. And that will tell me I'm happy. No, she can't do that. Have you thought about free will? I thought about it."
},
{
"end_time": 4434.855,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4408.558,
"text": " In fact, I thought about it even quite recently. First of all, I think it's useless kind of thought because because even though you see Stuart is very keen on free will because he says that this theory of microtubules and all that stuff gives a room for free will. So maybe it does in a way, but you see often people say, well, it's all determined anyway. And so I think"
},
{
"end_time": 4455.998,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4436.766,
"text": " People get a little bit confused. Going back to my experiences I used to have when I was very young and my younger brother was even younger, and he could always wallop me at this game, scissors, paper, stone. And I thought, how can he be walloping at that game of chance? Right. So to make sure it was a game of chance that he couldn't wallop me at."
},
{
"end_time": 4485.828,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4456.442,
"text": " I went into my father's study and I got out a book of logarithms and went into the middle of it and got out the string of numbers and produced which way you went by the string of numbers, followed it very carefully, and he couldn't beat me. So I thought, thank goodness, he's not reading my mind. It's just that he knows it's recognizing patterns and things like that. He's good at that. Maybe even unconsciously, he recognizes patterns and he knows which way I'm going to do next because I'm not really being random. So it's not randomness."
},
{
"end_time": 4516.135,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4486.476,
"text": " Yes, the free will is not random. So what is it? You see, I maybe I thought, you see, I think it's probably it's you're free to do something which may be very well determined. You see, you might do I take course A or course B, maybe in some meeting, you see, which making decisions about some big plan. And you want to know what is the consequence of doing A or B?"
},
{
"end_time": 4546.288,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4516.783,
"text": " Well, then you rely on your understanding of which is the right thing to do. So free will, it might be the same as somebody would do just by chance. That's not the point. The point is that you've used your consciousness as something to employ in making your decision. So that's what free will is for, in a sense. I don't know if I can say much more. And I also get impressed by things"
},
{
"end_time": 4573.541,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4546.698,
"text": " I hear things about bees and they're unbelievable. Yeah. And they seem to play. Un-bee-lievable. Un-bee-lievable. Yes, well, they, they, they, they, even they play, play football. They're some, they were telling me about little, they, mostly they're not trying to hunt for honey. They, they do things in little balls and they kick them around. There's some kind of football that they play. Why are they doing that? For fun?"
},
{
"end_time": 4603.848,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4575.094,
"text": " That would mean they have to be conscious, doesn't it? Maybe they are. I don't know. I don't have a view on this. I do believe that consciousness goes way down in the animal kingdom, sure. Is the universe discrete or continuous? I used to be very keen on discrete. People told me I got to go into anecdotes. I'm too old. I just talk about anecdotes in the physics. If you want an anecdote, I can give you an anecdote. I used to be very keen on discreteness. There were two things in mathematics that I thought, oh,"
},
{
"end_time": 4633.046,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4604.189,
"text": " These are the nice things for physics, ultimately, to be based on combinatorial things or maybe complex numbers. And I think I sort of that time thought combinatorial things. I'm surprised if you came from algebraic geometry that you would be more keen to the finite side, the discrete side. I probably was at that time. You said I had a sort of gradual conversion. I think the conversion came with David Finkelstein when, as he said after his talk,"
},
{
"end_time": 4661.527,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4633.456,
"text": " He gave this talk that Dennis Sharma took me to when I was a research fellow at St. John's in Cambridge. And we drove to London to hear this lecture given by David Finkelstein, which was on the Schwarzschild horizon, which is not a singular, is a horizon. And he described that. And I found that amazing. I thought it was very beautiful. At the end of the talk, I had a long chat with him about spin networks. So I described the spin networks to him."
},
{
"end_time": 4690.776,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4662.005,
"text": " And he told me afterwards that this meeting, we swapped subjects. I did general relativity from then on, and he had been doing GR, he swapped under combinatorics. I consider I got much the better deal. But that's, you see, I was thinking about combinatorial things and spin networks are very much that kind of thing. Can you not think about the complex numbers which give you the directions of spin for a spin half particle? Or do you instead think about this network, which is really the important thing?"
},
{
"end_time": 4719.548,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4691.186,
"text": " and the direction comes out of the network. I was playing with that idea. You said you've changed your tune now to be on the more continuous side or continuum side. Well, the power of complex analysis was the other thing which had impressed me and it's more drifted onto that side. Do you think the continuous lies at the classical level and then the discreteness lies at the quantum one? Do you think that's the way to quote unquote unify them or harmonize them?"
},
{
"end_time": 4751.152,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4721.442,
"text": " I wouldn't say anything like that is, I mean maybe. There's something, well obviously there's something discrete in quantum mechanics. I mean something which people used to think was continuous, shock shock, is actually discrete. Now speaking of what people used to think, you used to think that AI couldn't do what mathematicians do. Do you still hold that view because of their limitations, their formal systems? In a certain sense, yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4776.408,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4751.391,
"text": " I mean, you've got to be a little careful about these things. But I was hearing this recently, I think it was on Zoom Talk. Yeah, the remarkable 01 model or 01 model of chat GPT. What would be an example of something mathematical that you think a computer could never do this? Well, it doesn't do anything. You've got to tell him. Well, even if you put it on play, you just"
},
{
"end_time": 4804.718,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4776.613,
"text": " Press play and you say generate for me some math because if it's the auto play that is that's the issue here. That's easily solvable I mean it with this to there's a confusion I think I mean it was also important to me See because one of the talks that I attended when I was a graduate student in Cambridge nothing to do with what I was doing was a talk by a man called steam on mathematical logic and I learned about the I went about computer notion of computability. I learned about the girdle theorem"
},
{
"end_time": 4829.701,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4805.35,
"text": " I found it stunning because what it told me, you want to prove something in mathematics, how's this statement? What the Gödel theorem says, it says I am not provable by your methods, yet I know it's true. Why do I know it's true? I know it's true by virtue of my belief that the proof procedures only give you truths."
},
{
"end_time": 4859.548,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4830.145,
"text": " There is the idea that people can brain upload. That is, they can take your consciousness and put it onto a computer. What are your views on that? I'm saying no on that one, definitely. If a computer, when you say the word computer, you have to be saying what I mean by a computer and what Turing meant by a computer, which is a computational system. So if it's that, no is the answer. If you're talking about a physical entity, which is not an animal or not living being in our ordinary sense of the word, maybe."
},
{
"end_time": 4885.162,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4860.674,
"text": " But it has to take advantage of what we're taking advantage of without even worrying about it, which is presumably here I'm going way outside of what I know, but I'm saying it's whatever the physics is which governs the collapse of the wave function. Right. Now that is not quantum physics because quantum physics doesn't have an answer to that question. It's this physics which combines GR with quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 4903.729,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4885.742,
"text": " Do you think if quantum theory was not to be modified, then the many-worlds interpretation is the way to go?"
},
{
"end_time": 4931.237,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4904.258,
"text": " Oh, what I mean to say is, do you think quantum theory as it stands implies the many worlds theory? Yeah, I'm in a sense yes, because it says all these things are in superposition. But I'm not quite sure what the many worlds theory is."
},
{
"end_time": 4959.104,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4931.63,
"text": " Because it can't be just that. Otherwise, I wouldn't see just one world. So what is the rest of the theory, which tells me that I only see a limited proportion that may be there in superposition, but not many? Certainly not as different as they could be. I don't see all these alternatives. Now, is that to do with this little creature crawling through this multitude? Now, why doesn't this partner creature going off in another branch"
},
{
"end_time": 4979.821,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4960.555,
"text": " I'm just saying it's wrong. You're trying to say if I believed in quantum mechanics, yes, but then I can believe in a wrong thing and I get another wrong answer. I'm just being my rude self to say that quantum is wrong. We like that on toe on theories of everything."
},
{
"end_time": 5009.104,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4980.282,
"text": " So you were recently speaking to Bernardo Castrop about idealism, which is about consciousness as fundamental. So maybe you don't recall, but it doesn't matter. The point is some people believe consciousness to be fundamental. Was this a video thing? Yeah. No, I think I did recover that. Yeah. Okay. Yes, I think he was saying things which seemed to me orthogonal to what I was saying. Okay, so please recount your views on is consciousness fundamental?"
},
{
"end_time": 5036.732,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 5010.589,
"text": " Yes and no. How's that for an answer? A superposition answer. It depends at what level you're asking this question. I mean, if there were no consciousness, I can't see. You see, a question like this has to have a framework. You see, I'm talking within a certain framework of theories."
},
{
"end_time": 5063.131,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5037.534,
"text": " What's something that you used to be dismissive of when you were younger, that you used to disregard, repudiate, and now as you're older that you're more open to it? Oh, I see. Oh, no, no, it's worse. I've got more narrow-minded as I got older. Interesting. Oh, yes. I'm terribly narrow-minded now. I'm prepared to listen to other things, sure, but I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 5092.602,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5064.189,
"text": " No, I think CCC is right. I think that collapse of the wave function is right. It's a gravitational effect. Can you talk about that, about the CCC? No. Yeah. Just briefly, if you don't mind. Sure. Well, it was one thing when I was saying fashion, faith and fantasy, the fantasy was inflation. So I don't believe in inflation. Right. The current view of cosmology is that the very early stages of the universe, first tiny fraction of a second, there was this inflationary phase."
},
{
"end_time": 5123.08,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5093.08,
"text": " which was supposed to have smoothed out the universe and that's why it seems so uniform now it's a load of poppycock as far as i'm concerned i don't know about that word to use here it's probably poppycock's early mouth because if you reverse time it gives you the wrong answer i mean what black hole singularities are i mean any theory which would iron out singularities should iron out the singularities in black holes they're completely different the singularities in black holes have"
},
{
"end_time": 5151.544,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5123.558,
"text": " are absolutely wildly diverging via curvature. The singularity in the Big Bang was an extraordinarily special event. I haven't seen any explanation of this, and I had various wrong explanations of my own. I thought that maybe quantum, yes, when you have quantum theory, I was trying to say that singularities had to be one way around."
},
{
"end_time": 5180.725,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5152.449,
"text": " What would you like your legacy to be? So it's really fairly equally split, I think, between CCC, on the one hand, the cosmological picture, and all the wave functions. You see, the theory there is not developed enough for anything there. It needs much more. You see, the theory, that's more twisted, twisters in their offspring. And I'm hoping that, you see, when I talked about"
},
{
"end_time": 5210.811,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5181.442,
"text": " Talk to too many people today. And did I talk to you about the product of three vectors? I did, didn't I? Yes. Yes. You see, you multiply, you have, in Twister theory, in By-Twister theory, you have a product of three things gives you a fourth. And this is useful if you want to talk about split octonians. But there's another thing which might be useful for. Those three, it's really the span of those three things. It's like a vector product. It's not your, if you lost the vectors, it's really the span of the two."
},
{
"end_time": 5240.828,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5211.254,
"text": " It's a way you talk about the plane. So with the three things, it's the way you talk about the three space. Now, that's awfully tempting to me to think that that might have something to do with strong interactions. This is the SU-3. That's where the SU-3 resides. See, in one of my conversations with Feynman, they're all stories and each one is a nice story, but I had a conversation with Feynman, which Stephen Hawking had organized and it was"
},
{
"end_time": 5269.855,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5241.886,
"text": " And he was a bit grumpy because he, Stephen had disturbed his holiday. But anyway, and I was trying to describe Twister theory to him. And then I was trying to describe how you might describe particle physics in it. And he said, that's don't follow that route. He said, Twister, when I say about Twister, is it very interesting? Yes, keep that going. But don't try to follow that particular route towards particle physics. That's wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 5299.053,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5270.196,
"text": " That's not a fruitful route. And he was completely right. That was wrong. It was much too early. So we tried to do particle physics with twisters, putting a few of them together and all that. And I think that was wrong. I think he was right. He was right that I was wrong. However, doesn't mean that the thing with bite, it's much more like what it's more, it's more like SU three, because you really don't care where the vectors are. It's the space."
},
{
"end_time": 5327.449,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5299.582,
"text": " And it's a way of attributing another entity to it. I don't know if I can say what I mean. It's a bit more like the other exact gauge theory there is in physics, which is electromagnetism. And you do have a thing like this in bitwister theory as well. You have this thing which I call multiplying by i. I needed that as well. So it's another, it's a circle. So you have this circle and you have this three-dimensional space. The question is, what do you want your legacy to be?"
},
{
"end_time": 5356.288,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5328.183,
"text": " Well, I say it's a twist of theory, you see, but CCC is quite a good one for a legacy, I guess, because it does change our picture of cosmology completely. Do you believe it to be the case or do you just posit that as a possibility? Look, it's a completely different story. In this case, there is strong evidence that nobody pays any attention to, but I say nobody, not quite anymore. Conformal cyclic cosmology. We see these signals."
},
{
"end_time": 5383.148,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5357.073,
"text": " I mean, there isn't a nice, a nice wrongness about them too. Okay. But the wrongness is just a factor of two. I mean, all of these are anecdotes. As I said, I'm too old to do physics. I just do anecdotes. No, I had Zoom, not Zoom. This was just email communication with Alan, Alan Guth about cosmology. Yes. That's right."
},
{
"end_time": 5406.834,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5384.411,
"text": " And he was telling me about, I would give him all the credit, he put our boots on and followed exactly what we should do in our calculations. And he said, your calculation of how big the Hawking points are, these are spots which we claim are there observed with strong observational 99.98% confidence level."
},
{
"end_time": 5431.903,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5407.363,
"text": " Particle physicists tell me that's much too small. You need much more confidence level than that. It's only about three sigma or something. I don't know what all that means, but that's what they tell me. But still, for cosmology, that's pretty confident level. And these spots are there. They're all the same size. They're all about eight times the diameter of the full moon."
},
{
"end_time": 5462.022,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5432.858,
"text": " Alan Guth tells me, you're wrong. There should be four times the damage. He doesn't tell me the damage. He tells in terms of radians or minutes of arc or something. I forget what that means. So I'm used to the full moon. I'm using my low grade. There are only four times. He said there should be four times. So I email Christoph and I say, look, Alan Guth tells me we got the wrong size. They're not eight. They're only four times. Christoph tells me, no, that can't be wrong. I go and check, but he's sure he's just made a mistake."
},
{
"end_time": 5490.435,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5462.756,
"text": " He comes back to me. He's right. They should only be four times. So we have to do something with our theory. We have an idea what you should do. It doesn't change the whole scheme. I mean, ordinary cosmology doesn't get them at all. Getting just a factor of two wrong is mild, it's minimal. And they're seen both in WMAP and in Planck. I'm only counting the ones which are strongest"
},
{
"end_time": 5520.606,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5490.862,
"text": " and which are the strongest ones, which are the same ones as seen both in WMAP and Planck. There are five points, but I see points, so these little spots in the sky, five of them, which we see in exactly the same places in WMAP and in Planck. Confidence level calculated by Christoph, because I don't know how to do that kind of thing, 99.98% confidence level. People contact me and say they don't believe us."
},
{
"end_time": 5547.705,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5521.305,
"text": " People say, no, I've done the calculus all by different way, and I only get 95% confidence level. Okay, well, you could use your methods you like, but that's not interesting to me. You just outlined how you'd like to be remembered in physics. And I'm curious how you'd like to be remembered as a person. As a person? Not too much of an idiot, I hope. Well, look, there's a book coming out any minute. I better read it first."
},
{
"end_time": 5576.749,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5548.575,
"text": " Now see how it tells me if I might be remembered by people. I don't know. Who's taking on the torch that you're passing? Who are the people? Yeah. And what is that torch? Briefly speaking. There's more than one of them, you see. There's one in Twister Theory. I don't know what, I don't know who's carrying it on Twister Theory because it's gone. You see, if I'm talking about Twister Theory, there's three versions. You see, there's"
},
{
"end_time": 5606.647,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5577.551,
"text": " No, the answer is it's the pseudo Twister theory and Twister theory and and pseudo Twister theory. OK. And it's pseudo Twister theory done by the mathematicians, which is all positive definite space. Sure. The pseudo Twister done by Ed Whitten and company has got two two time dimensions and two space dimensions. Those are pseudo because the dimension is wrong. Mine has got one time and three space. So I'm calling that the real Twister theory. Now, the number of people using doing real Twister theory is not very big."
},
{
"end_time": 5636.715,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5607.551,
"text": " What's your advice to students who are getting into the field of theoretical physics and what are your views on academia as it stands now? I think there's probably too much domination by things you do on computers. I'm not quite sure what I mean there."
},
{
"end_time": 5667.773,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5638.148,
"text": " I don't know. I mean, I don't really, I don't know most of what people do in physics and I can't really comment. So I can't be rude about it. It shouldn't be rude about things. I don't know. Um, I think it's difficult to shake cosmo. I've noticed that in cosmology. You see, this is a scheme. I'm scrolling about CCC now, which is not taken seriously simply because it's too outrageous. It is outrageous. So if somebody had mentioned it to me before I thought about it, I might've thought it's not worth thinking about."
},
{
"end_time": 5693.404,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5668.302,
"text": " I did even have a session with Stephen Hawking, me and Stephen and nobody else, and I described CCC to him. I don't know what they thought of me. He came away without saying a word. Though he asked me one question which showed he didn't completely understand what I'd said. So I tried to get that straight. I don't think he believed a word of what I said. What do I do? Well, it's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. I agree with that. Doesn't mean it's wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 5716.869,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5694.309,
"text": " There's evidence for it and it solves the problem of the specialness of the Big Bang. Nothing else does that I've seen. Now just imagine you're speaking to students and they want to know what advice do you have, sir? I think when people ask me that question, apart from being completely flummoxed, I say do what excites you. I mean you have to concentrate"
},
{
"end_time": 5744.121,
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"start_time": 5717.125,
"text": " In doing doing physics or research in general you have to have in your area which you concentrate on but you've also got to have a broader area so it's a bit like a funnel like this you go way down deep in the area you're interested in but you should keep an interest in what's going on all the time as well so don't shut your eyes to what the rest of the world there may you may see a connection which nobody else has spotted thank you sir it's been a pleasure thank you"
},
{
"end_time": 5766.391,
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"start_time": 5745.981,
"text": " Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like."
},
{
"end_time": 5791.988,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5766.664,
"text": " That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, 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"
},
{
"end_time": 5810.265,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5791.988,
"text": " like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube"
},
{
"end_time": 5839.599,
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"text": " which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes. They disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, 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": 5848.37,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5839.599,
"text": " I also read in the comments that hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google"
},
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"text": " podcast."
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"text": " 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. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
},
{
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"start_time": 5900.435,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store."
},
{
"end_time": 5930.503,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5909.462,
"text": " Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.