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Gregory Chaitin: No Scientific Innovation Since the 1920s?
September 20, 2024
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I'm disappointed. I'd hoped for more exciting developments in my lifetime. There's too much bureaucracy now, controlling what researchers do, and they're being driven crazy. I think everyone knows the system is deeply flawed. Nobody knows how to change it.
Gregory Chaitin, a maverick mathematician and computer scientist who published his first groundbreaking paper at 15 and went on to become one of the founders of algorithmic information theory, argues that we're living in an era of stagnation in fundamental research.
Despite technological advancements, Chaitin believes our current academic system is suppressing true innovation. In this lecture for our series here on Toe called Rethinking the Foundations of the Academy, Chaitin shows us how the next Einstein would be stifled by today's publish or perish culture. From the perils of bureaucracy and science to the parallels between ancient civilizations and modern research institutions, Chaitin's riveting critique is no stranger to controversy.
Are we trading groundbreaking discoveries for incremental progress? And could the solution lie in a return to science as a hobby rather than big business? I'm disappointed. I had hoped for more exciting developments in my lifetime. The fundamental theory of physics is still quantum mechanics from a century ago. It is now, I think, pretty close to a century.
And I find that disappointing. I think that nature's imagination is probably greater than our imagination. I think there are sociology of science reasons that fundamental innovation is not going at the same pace that it did in the books that I read as a young student in the 1950s, early 1960s. So let me tell you a few stories indicating my point of view.
Now, I mean, there is good, great stuff. The Webb telescope and the fact that things are not as expected is terrific. It's an amazing instrument, but even more amazing are the observations of the early universe. Gravity wave astronomy. I was waiting decades for that. That's very good. Now all this business having to do with Bell's inequality in fundamental physics.
That kind of stuff entanglement shows that reality is much stranger than we expected, although it's still basically the same old quantum mechanics from way back. You know, there's a, there's a paper by Einstein Podolsky Rosen from the 1930s, maybe 1935. The difference is now we can do experiments and the experiments I understand are pretty challenging. The results, a friend of mine in Paris has coined the term
Convivial solipsism to describe his current interpretation of the foundations of quantum mechanics based on Gdankin and actual experiments. And reality is sort of in trouble, as you can guess from that name, that term. That is all good. I'm in favor, but I'm sort of disappointed, for example, that we don't know what the dark matter is. We haven't a clue, and it seems to be most of the matter in the universe. It manifests itself by its
Gravitational influence, you know, galaxy rotation curves, clusters of galaxies. And there are down to earth phenomena like ball lightning that I think nobody understands. And a lot of people don't even believe in. Although I, my impression is that the observational evidence is pretty solid that there is such a thing, but there isn't as any understanding of how it could be possible. You know, these are spheres of electricity that drift rather slowly that last several seconds, maybe on the order of 10, 20 seconds.
What is Consciousness?
Science cannot really touch that. So I'm disappointed and why is this happening? Well I think part of the reason is there's too much bureaucracy now controlling what researchers do and they're being driven crazy. They're not being allowed to do good curiosity based research. They're sort of machines into making money getting research grants for their university and I can give some examples of this. I was at a meeting in Arizona once having a beer with Lenny Suskind
a physicist at stanford and it turns out that he had studied at the brooklyn tech high school in new york city and i had studied at the bronx high school of science high school also in new york city but in the bronx instead of brooklyn and he said he was disappointed with the young students he said when he was a student he and his fellow graduate students you know didn't pay attention to their professor and they wanted to
Break the system, discover new things, create a whole new world. And he said the graduate students he gets now to do want to do a PhD with him, ask him to give them a research topic. They don't have their own challenging ideas. They ask him to give them a research topic. And then they proceed to grind out paper after paper, small incremental little things for the rest of their career on that topic.
And there's a reason, of course, because if you hesitate to learn a new topic or to get involved in a new area, you're, you know, the publisher perish problem that you have to have a steady stream of sausages coming out of the machine. Oh, there's another part of this, you know, this business of the Dean can count, but the Dean can't read. You're measured only by the number of papers you publish. The quality of the papers is irrelevant, right? I think everyone knows the system is deeply flawed.
Nobody knows how to change it, but a lot of things that human beings do are deeply flawed and nobody knows how to change it. I'm hoping there will be a rebirth, a renaissance with more innovation and more fundamental ideas, new fundamental ideas someday. Can you tell me what's meant by the current system?
Because when people hear that and they think, well, there are thousands of universities and it's not as if they're in collusion with one another. There are different countries, there are different laws. How could a system have been developed in order to even call that system the system? Well, there is a system to be accredited, to be accredited. A university grants degrees for these degrees to be recognized. The university has to be accredited by international accrediting institutions. And there are all kinds of rules and regulations.
so that you count. And so there is actually tremendous pressure to conform and to do things at your university like everyone else does. Otherwise you're in trouble. For example? For example, I'm at a new Institute for Advanced Study in Morocco at UM6P, which is quite remarkable. They're building a world-class university town in the desert, in the Moroccan desert. But it turns out there are, I don't know, 30 or 40 institutes for advanced study in the world.
And there are rules, and you have to follow those rules. Who would have guessed? You know, and the university, UM6P, a lot of their graduates who are the best and the brightest in Morocco, young people, guess what? They go to get more advanced degrees in France, in the United States, elsewhere out of Morocco. And for that to work, the institution that granted their degree has to be accredited. I think there's a lot more pressure to conform
Then outsiders realize, and I think we need some more creative chaos. You know, I think things should be looser and more fun. You know, if you listen to Sabin Hassenfelder story of what it was like for her to try to have a career in physics in Germany, it sounds like it's not much fun, which is why she dropped out. I don't know whether it would admire or the pity the young people who decide to go into science in universities nowadays. I certainly wouldn't do it.
I'm a rebel. I would never allow myself to be oppressed in this manner. And I don't think it's good for innovation. Technological innovation gets done by startups, and that seems to work pretty well. For example, in the United States, in France, the rules for making a startup, I understand, are such that it's not so easy. But US, or at least Texas, according to Elon Musk,
is a good place for a startup and that's very important but the university world is is much more conformist you know universities are basically uh conservative institutions with tremendous inertia you know i don't believe in big institutions as far as fundamental research or creativity is concerned it's not good it's not what we need but you know there was a renaissance in in europe
It was quite remarkable, Renaissance scientifically and artistically, architecturally. There are good periods and bad periods as far as creativity and innovation are concerned. We have a good period for technological innovation, but not for fundamental science. But, you know, these things come and go. Maybe it's AI works and there are robots everywhere and people have more free time. They'll be able to pursue their curiosity instead of struggling for research grants all the time.
So you're in trouble. There's also the fact that new ideas will be rejected by referees in general. You know, there's a joke that says, which is true though, the worldly wisdom, that it's better to be wrong with the majority than to be right on your own. I think that's certainly the case in the world of science where new ideas are treated viciously. Can you give me an example?
To give an example, Lee Van Valen had this wonderful idea for a new principle in evolutionary biology called the Red Queen Principle, which I think is very important, and he couldn't get it published anywhere. So in the end, the way he published it is he created a new journal, probably not just for this paper, where he was the editor-in-chief and he published it himself.
And this is his greatest contribution to evolutionary biology. And that kind of thing is typical. I think David Reuel, a physicist involved with strange attractors, told me a similar story about his experiences. Now, another example of this is my wife and I were in Singapore once talking to Sydney Brenner at the end of his life. He was in a wheelchair, but his mind was as sharp as ever.
Sydney Brenner, let me tell you who he is. He has a Nobel Prize, but you know, that doesn't say much. You remember Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, of course, based on sort of stolen x-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin. But anyway, they did it. Well, Watson was silly enough to go back to the US after making this great discovery. He left Cambridge and Crick was left on his own at Cambridge. And the way Crick worked is he needed to talk all day long to someone.
That someone had been Watson and they would usually talk in a bar, by the way, not at the university, a pub. So Creek needed someone and the person who replaced Watson was Sydney Brenner from South Africa, Cambridge. Sydney Brenner was a great mind and he's not afraid to shock people. And what he said is he has a whole bunch of friends with Nobel prizes and none of them
Could have done the work that earned them the Nobel Prize in the current environment and that's a pretty serious condemnation of the current environment. Now technology is doing great, right? I'm talking about fundamental science.
Can you just briefly define what fundamental science is? And the reason is that there are some people like Sean Carroll, who talk about that there is no crisis in physics, or at least no major crisis in physics, and then they'll cite engineering facts and not fundamental breakthroughs. Well, you've just answered your question, I think rather well. So it's I find it boring. Frankly, I can't believe that nature doesn't have any more imagination. I can't believe that we
In the 1920s, found the fundamental theory of physical reality, quantum mechanics, and that's it. And it's all over from now on. If you extrapolate from the history of science, every period has thought that they had sort of final knowledge. They couldn't imagine anything else, of course. But every so many years, there was a paradigm shift. And I'm disappointed that there hasn't been one in the past century. And I suspect it's because
The current system doesn't let people come up with a paradigm shift. And if they did, they would never be able to get it published. Let me give you two stories about two people who are not following the current fashion. I'm going to include myself, but let me start with my friend Stephen Wolfram.
The way steven has been able to remarkable work is just published a series of books on diverse topics that are really very fascinating is because he's not working in a university environment what he did was to create a company and he's a self funding his research needed to create a company because he needed very sophisticated software to do the calculations but it is the way he works the way he does research.
You know to develop that you had to make it a product that you were selling so that money would come in and you could keep developing the software. It's like what happens with weapons. You know it's very expensive to design say a military fighter jet. And so what countries do what the US does is it sells emasculated version of it to allies. You have to have a larger volume of sales to justify the enormous cost the engineering cost of designing the airplane.
So you sell versions to get the volumes you need of sales, you sell versions that have deliberately been sort of broken, you know, not all the best features in them. So this is what Stephen, in order to have the tool he needed for his research, made a company and was selling the tool. And after several
Decades, he now has a technology stack that is incredibly powerful. In my opinion, it's an artificial intelligence. It's not a neural net artificial intelligence, but it's a, I think, a very substantial artificial intelligence. And, um, and that's the tool he uses in his research. It's a microscope or his telescope. And by the way, Steven is pretty much self-taught. He was publishing papers on what used to be called high energy physics. It used to be called particle physics. Now it's called high energy physics.
When he was a teenager, I don't know if he has a degree. Maybe he put a bunch of papers together and Caltech gave him a PhD for that. But he's self-taught. He was a child prodigy. Now forgive me for mentioning myself. I'm also self-taught. I have a high school degree. I don't have a college degree. I only have honorary doctorates.
I had a day job and a night job, like artists very often, you know, they work as a waiter during the day and at night they try to do stand-up comedy or some other thing or paint. So my day job was writing software for IBM for new products.
My hobby was doing fundamental research. Another approach to this is what Andrew Wiles did to follow the Fermat's last proofs of the Hermat's last theorem, which is that he worked for 10 years in his attic, but he had to keep up a stream of papers. Meanwhile, he would have lost his position as a professor at Princeton. Maybe he hated the fact that he had to do those papers or maybe they were exercises on the way to solving proving Fermat's last theorem that he could separate out and publish those individual papers.
There's another phenomena called, what is it, salami publications where you take a piece of work and you divide it into very thin slices and you can have a whole series of papers on the subject. So I think the system is broken. I think the bureaucracy controlling research is too high. I don't think there should be a bureaucracy controlling research. If you look at how Watson encrypted their research at the medical research council in the Cavendish lab,
of Cambridge University. They were protected by Bragg, a Nobel Prize winner, who got funding for his, for the entire Cavendish lab, I believe it was, you know, the three years at a time or more. And within the people who worked, just had to convince him that they were working on some reasonable project. They didn't have to keep constantly applying for grants and writing progress reports and showing deliverables. By the way, this reminds me of Stanislaw Lulam's great film,
Ulam was a mathematician too about a progress report he once wrote and the progress reports said great progress was made on writing this month's progress report. That was his progress report and this was the guy who figured out how to make a hydrogen bomb work. Teller got most of the credit but I think the essential idea was actually Ulam's
Was he saying that sarcastically that great progress is made writing this progress report? Yes, of course. He thought that progress reports were ridiculous. You know, there's also the phenomena that you have, if you apply for a grant, you have to promise what you do, you're going to do in advance. And it's hard to tell if you're doing curiosity based research where you're going to go. So, you know, there's the old trick that you do the research and then you don't tell anybody you apply for a grant for it.
But you've already done the research. You know, the system is very badly broken, but we haven't seen, in my opinion, enough fundamental advances since the 1920s.
At this point, you may be wondering, like myself, why Greg continually puts the 1920s as the latest revolution in physics. I emailed Greg afterward, saying, Dear Gregory, In our talk, you mentioned that the foundations haven't changed since the 1920s. However, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there were significant developments such as Electroweak Unification, Confinement, and QED. Did you mean to say that there's been no new innovation since the 1970s? Greg then responded, and I have permission to use his voice here,
You have a right to disagree, of course, but seen from a vast distance, the basic quantum framework, the real revolution was the 1920s. At least that's how I see it. To me, the topics you mention are just details. Best, Greg. Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs.
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So to give another example, I think the European community with everything being controlled by bureaucrats in Brussels from the point of view of scientific creativity is awful. I was once in Greece and I asked someone in Greece, how is it that the ancient Greeks were so creative? And he told me, well, they asked themselves the same question. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me where he found the answer, but the answer was that compare Greece with Egypt.
Egypt is relatively flat and there was a central authority that was fairly stable that would control all of Egypt and that way Egypt was very stable for a long long time but they're not known for their scientific creativity whereas the Greeks were separated on islands separated by mountains there were many city states that meant that
Many new ideas were possible. Can you tell me about ancient Egypt? Because some people who are listening would say, well, ancient Egypt was tremendously inventive. They, after all, made the pyramids and there's still no consensus as to how the pyramids were developed. Well, the pyramids would show that they were wonderful engineers. But do you have philosophical texts like
Plato's dialogues, for example. Now Aristotle, by the way, one of the great so-called Greek philosophers actually wasn't Greek. That shows that good minds can come from anywhere. But since he was not Greek, he was not really 100% Greek like Plato was. Plato's dialogues are preserved. They're wonderful. You just have to translate them and people are constantly doing that. But Aristotle's works are secondhand.
their lecture notes taken by students. One of the important things was that a lot of ancient Greek texts that went through the Islamic world were preserved at the Library of Alexandria, which had a lot of wonderful people. Alexandria is in what is now Egypt.
And at one point, this was a tremendous intellectual center, more than Athens. It was such a tremendous intellectual center that Euclid, for example, assembled Euclid's Elements in Alexandria. It had the great library. My dad was in the theater and he said, you write a script, you get together actors, you direct them, you rehearse, and then opening night comes and basically magic has to happen. Sometimes magic happens and sometimes it doesn't.
Alexandria was one of these magic places. Previous centuries, it had been Athens, but the people in Athens weren't all from Athens. Some of them came from other Greek city states and became celebrated, attracted attention and went to Athens. The same way that at one period in time, the place to go was Paris. It was a tremendous intellectual hotbed. It's difficult to say why at one point Paris was so fertile artistically at this point in time,
It probably isn't, maybe from one period it was, I don't know, could it have been Berlin? Magic has to happen, it's basically, I don't know, you could have a very scholarly book saying why did the Renaissance take place, and I'm sure there are many reasons, but why was there a wonderful library in Alexandria, for example, which was a gathering point for
The top intellectuals of the period during the great Islamic period, why did they translate texts from ancient or Greek into Arabic, which then made their way into Europe, very often in translations from the Arabic, I believe. I'm not a historian.
It's complicated. I don't know why there are periods of creativity, but I think that large centralized bureaucracies that control everything and control research are definitely not good for creativity. They may be good for technological innovation, although I think the universities are not the great innovators. I think it's mostly small startup firms that are tremendous innovators technologically.
That sounds like something that AI can solve.
Well, I'm not sure I can solve everything except for a robot car. For giving the progress reports, why can't you just feed an LLM your research and say, generate for me a progress report that fits this template? Well, I don't see why you have to write a progress report. You just want to have a paper at the end. Progress report. I see. Just gets in your way. So what you want to do is you want to split up the European community into separate nations.
Because then there will be a school of physics in France, there'll be a school of physics in Italy, there'll be a school of physics in Germany, and they can be different. But now when you have a bureaucracy, a centralized bureaucracy in Brussels and you have
European committees that decide what gets funded, this tends to make uniform everything and people only work on the fashionable subjects. So from that point of view, the United States should be split up by the way that may happen by itself, given the current mess in the politics there. But if each state
Instead of having a National Science Foundation in Washington, you know, many states in the United States could be a country in Europe. And from the point of view of creativity, it's good to have many places with different trying out different ideas because otherwise it's uniform. Everybody's working on the same fashionable ideas.
And then you have this phenomenon, as I said, that people think it's better to be wrong with the majority than to be right on by yourself. Sabin Hassenfelder, by the way, did a podcast saying why she stopped doing physics and started doing podcasts. Her description of the system is rather horrendous. So I couldn't work in the current environment. I was doing my research as a hobby and, and working on something much easier, which is writing software.
I wouldn't have been able to get grants for the research I was doing, and Stephen Wolfram made his own company to fund his own research. You have to be very good to pull that off, but he of course has done it brilliantly. And in the old days, let me give another example that's more familiar to French people than to people outside of France. There was a great scientist called Louis Pasteur,
Now Pasteur was not part of the university system in France. He created the Institut Pasteur and it was supported by contributions and subscriptions that he got based on his spectacular research that was of great value to France, by the way. I'm afraid I sound a little old and tired, but what I'm trying to convey is that another fact is that the best age for fundamental innovation is when you're in high school.
Because afterwards you start being brainwashed. Steven and I were chatting to each other about that. Afterwards, if you continue on to the university, you start being brainwashed with the current, what is it called? The current fashions, the current paradigms. Right. And so if you want to come up with really innovative ideas that can go off in your directions, if you don't have them in high school, I mean,
Stephen has a summer camp for high school students where he feels it's the last stage at which he can influence, really influence people because afterwards they get caught in the system. I know you may, you yourself may be an example because you were a physicist, right? You know a lot of physics, but as far as I can tell, you're not at the university. You're doing a wonderful series of podcasts. So this is an example. We're all examples of people who don't fit into the current system.
Einstein, for example, when he did his work, his best ideas were when he was working in the Swiss patent office. He wasn't in a university. He had trouble getting a position. He couldn't get a position. And he was working in the Swiss patent office. And from what I've heard, there wasn't much work in the Swiss patent office. So he could actually work on his own things. The first miracle is that he came up with three incredible papers in 1905, right? The photoelectric effect,
There's also a special relativity and then the energy mass equivalence. But the real miracle is that this nobody, this unknown, you know, ridiculous government job, these papers were published in the finest physics journal in Germany. Well, there were there weren't many and Alan, their physique. At that time, there were very few journals. And the person who made the decision to publish them. And this is the real miracle was Max Planck. And for Einstein was always grateful to Max Planck.
publishing those papers.
Well, no, at first, I think Planck apologized for the photoelectric effect because people didn't believe it. They thought it was an interesting idea, but it was too revolutionary. The idea that Maxwell's equations and waves could also be particles and something discrete. So that was perhaps his most revolutionary paper.
The three the stuff on special activity had almost been done by poincare if maxwell had lived maybe he would have done it that's another example of somebody outside the system a rebel an unconventional person and the miracle is that his paper nowadays nobody would publish papers from somebody like that even if they were wonderful especially if they were wonderful because the referees would would say. This is nonsense you know i don't believe this.
Another problem is that experiments which are not in accordance with existing theory are rejected. You can't publish them. Now those are precisely the experiments that could lead to new physics. I'm in particular referring to one of my hobby horses, which is called fusion. I think there's
Ample experimental evidence of some unusual phenomena taking place and actually there have been experiments pointing in that direction for many many years going back probably to the nineteen twenties or something but they're dismissed out of hand now that's exactly the wrong attitude when an experiment goes against the current theories you shouldn't say we're not publishing this it must be a mistake the experimenter must be fooling himself or herself
That's the wrong thing to do. What you just said, what you just say is how interesting maybe this is pointing the way to new physics. That's when you want to do fundamental advances in physics, but the current system doesn't want to do fundamental physics. You know, it's a play safe system where you publish papers that a group of people will approve of the referees. And, you know, having a committee decide something
It's a very bad idea. Somebody once said the intelligence of a committee is the intelligence of the stupidest member of the committee because you have to make compromises in order for the committee to come to a decision. So in other words, I'm a romantic. I believe in individuals working outside the system and coming up with fundamental advances. And it was better when science was a hobby. Now that science is big business, there's too much money involved.
You know, when nuclear physics was being developed in the 30s, 1930s, by Enrico Fermi and some other people, talking about the nucleus of the atom was like wanting to write poetry in ancient Greek. After the war, the situation changed because then it was weapons development. This is all very unfortunate from the point of view of fundamental advances. Technology has advanced in a very impressive fashion in the last, I don't know, since the Second World War. You know, that makes us like the Romans.
If you look back in history, the Romans were great engineers and great administrators. What was it called? La Pax Romana, the piece imposed by the Roman Empire. The Greeks were always fighting each other, the different city-states. They were much more innovative. They came up with, I think, many more ideas. In fact, I think the Romans used Greek slaves. They were the intellectuals in the Roman Empire, I think.
Very often. So we're in a Roman period where up to the Second World War, I think, was a period of fundamental innovation. Strangely enough, a lot of, for example, Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's work on uncomputability was done in the 30s between the First World War and the Second World War in Europe, which was a period of tremendous chaos.
between the two wars. One war had been a disaster and another war was about to begin. Nevertheless, that very fundamental work was done in pure mathematics that my work is based on. Since the Second World War, science has become big business. It's not a hobby anymore for a small group that really loves it and does it only out of curiosity.
And I think that has that has destroyed fundamental innovation in my opinion. But of course, you know, I'm an oddball. My friends are oddballs. Stephen Wolfram is a very successful oddball. I admire him greatly. I can't believe that I think that nature has more imagination than we do. And I don't see why this particular point in time has found the final fundamental theory of physical reality. It's just the current way things are done.
It's not helping to allow people to come up with new ideas and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to get them published unless they self publish or something. Steven publishes his own books, he has a publishing company. So I hope that maybe if people stop having children, the human population will go down and universities will become small again
And governments will not be pouring money into universities to fund the research they want instead of allowing the professors to be driven by their curiosity. And maybe there'll be a revival of fundamental research. You know, these things come in cycles. There are periods of history, like the Roman Empire, where the engineering work was extremely good.
and periods where fundamental ideas like the ancient Greeks thrived. But the ancient Greeks are not known for their, you know, the engineering projects that have lasted millennia, like some of the Roman roads, which are still in perfect condition in Europe. So I think we're going through a bad period as far as fundamental research is concerned. As far as technology is concerned, we're doing, I think, pretty well. But I think the human race deserves better.
The human spirit is capable of more than this. It's just that human creativity and imagination is being suppressed by the current system. So you think we're at a peak of application and a trough of innovation? Absolutely. Thank you, Professor. Thank you for this presentation. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
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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."
},
{
"end_time": 110.913,
"index": 4,
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"text": " I'm disappointed. I'd hoped for more exciting developments in my lifetime. There's too much bureaucracy now, controlling what researchers do, and they're being driven crazy. I think everyone knows the system is deeply flawed. Nobody knows how to change it."
},
{
"end_time": 129.036,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 113.251,
"text": " Gregory Chaitin, a maverick mathematician and computer scientist who published his first groundbreaking paper at 15 and went on to become one of the founders of algorithmic information theory, argues that we're living in an era of stagnation in fundamental research."
},
{
"end_time": 159.087,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 129.258,
"text": " Despite technological advancements, Chaitin believes our current academic system is suppressing true innovation. In this lecture for our series here on Toe called Rethinking the Foundations of the Academy, Chaitin shows us how the next Einstein would be stifled by today's publish or perish culture. From the perils of bureaucracy and science to the parallels between ancient civilizations and modern research institutions, Chaitin's riveting critique is no stranger to controversy."
},
{
"end_time": 188.626,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 159.633,
"text": " Are we trading groundbreaking discoveries for incremental progress? And could the solution lie in a return to science as a hobby rather than big business? I'm disappointed. I had hoped for more exciting developments in my lifetime. The fundamental theory of physics is still quantum mechanics from a century ago. It is now, I think, pretty close to a century."
},
{
"end_time": 218.541,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 189.172,
"text": " And I find that disappointing. I think that nature's imagination is probably greater than our imagination. I think there are sociology of science reasons that fundamental innovation is not going at the same pace that it did in the books that I read as a young student in the 1950s, early 1960s. So let me tell you a few stories indicating my point of view."
},
{
"end_time": 244.138,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 219.002,
"text": " Now, I mean, there is good, great stuff. The Webb telescope and the fact that things are not as expected is terrific. It's an amazing instrument, but even more amazing are the observations of the early universe. Gravity wave astronomy. I was waiting decades for that. That's very good. Now all this business having to do with Bell's inequality in fundamental physics."
},
{
"end_time": 273.609,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 244.838,
"text": " That kind of stuff entanglement shows that reality is much stranger than we expected, although it's still basically the same old quantum mechanics from way back. You know, there's a, there's a paper by Einstein Podolsky Rosen from the 1930s, maybe 1935. The difference is now we can do experiments and the experiments I understand are pretty challenging. The results, a friend of mine in Paris has coined the term"
},
{
"end_time": 303.695,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 273.865,
"text": " Convivial solipsism to describe his current interpretation of the foundations of quantum mechanics based on Gdankin and actual experiments. And reality is sort of in trouble, as you can guess from that name, that term. That is all good. I'm in favor, but I'm sort of disappointed, for example, that we don't know what the dark matter is. We haven't a clue, and it seems to be most of the matter in the universe. It manifests itself by its"
},
{
"end_time": 333.387,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 304.087,
"text": " Gravitational influence, you know, galaxy rotation curves, clusters of galaxies. And there are down to earth phenomena like ball lightning that I think nobody understands. And a lot of people don't even believe in. Although I, my impression is that the observational evidence is pretty solid that there is such a thing, but there isn't as any understanding of how it could be possible. You know, these are spheres of electricity that drift rather slowly that last several seconds, maybe on the order of 10, 20 seconds."
},
{
"end_time": 349.616,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 334.036,
"text": " What is Consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 379.275,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 349.957,
"text": " Science cannot really touch that. So I'm disappointed and why is this happening? Well I think part of the reason is there's too much bureaucracy now controlling what researchers do and they're being driven crazy. They're not being allowed to do good curiosity based research. They're sort of machines into making money getting research grants for their university and I can give some examples of this. I was at a meeting in Arizona once having a beer with Lenny Suskind"
},
{
"end_time": 405.811,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 379.275,
"text": " a physicist at stanford and it turns out that he had studied at the brooklyn tech high school in new york city and i had studied at the bronx high school of science high school also in new york city but in the bronx instead of brooklyn and he said he was disappointed with the young students he said when he was a student he and his fellow graduate students you know didn't pay attention to their professor and they wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 430.077,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 406.186,
"text": " Break the system, discover new things, create a whole new world. And he said the graduate students he gets now to do want to do a PhD with him, ask him to give them a research topic. They don't have their own challenging ideas. They ask him to give them a research topic. And then they proceed to grind out paper after paper, small incremental little things for the rest of their career on that topic."
},
{
"end_time": 459.258,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 430.623,
"text": " And there's a reason, of course, because if you hesitate to learn a new topic or to get involved in a new area, you're, you know, the publisher perish problem that you have to have a steady stream of sausages coming out of the machine. Oh, there's another part of this, you know, this business of the Dean can count, but the Dean can't read. You're measured only by the number of papers you publish. The quality of the papers is irrelevant, right? I think everyone knows the system is deeply flawed."
},
{
"end_time": 483.114,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 459.872,
"text": " Nobody knows how to change it, but a lot of things that human beings do are deeply flawed and nobody knows how to change it. I'm hoping there will be a rebirth, a renaissance with more innovation and more fundamental ideas, new fundamental ideas someday. Can you tell me what's meant by the current system?"
},
{
"end_time": 511.493,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 483.609,
"text": " Because when people hear that and they think, well, there are thousands of universities and it's not as if they're in collusion with one another. There are different countries, there are different laws. How could a system have been developed in order to even call that system the system? Well, there is a system to be accredited, to be accredited. A university grants degrees for these degrees to be recognized. The university has to be accredited by international accrediting institutions. And there are all kinds of rules and regulations."
},
{
"end_time": 540.247,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 511.834,
"text": " so that you count. And so there is actually tremendous pressure to conform and to do things at your university like everyone else does. Otherwise you're in trouble. For example? For example, I'm at a new Institute for Advanced Study in Morocco at UM6P, which is quite remarkable. They're building a world-class university town in the desert, in the Moroccan desert. But it turns out there are, I don't know, 30 or 40 institutes for advanced study in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 566.886,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 540.725,
"text": " And there are rules, and you have to follow those rules. Who would have guessed? You know, and the university, UM6P, a lot of their graduates who are the best and the brightest in Morocco, young people, guess what? They go to get more advanced degrees in France, in the United States, elsewhere out of Morocco. And for that to work, the institution that granted their degree has to be accredited. I think there's a lot more pressure to conform"
},
{
"end_time": 596.118,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 567.176,
"text": " Then outsiders realize, and I think we need some more creative chaos. You know, I think things should be looser and more fun. You know, if you listen to Sabin Hassenfelder story of what it was like for her to try to have a career in physics in Germany, it sounds like it's not much fun, which is why she dropped out. I don't know whether it would admire or the pity the young people who decide to go into science in universities nowadays. I certainly wouldn't do it."
},
{
"end_time": 623.046,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 596.578,
"text": " I'm a rebel. I would never allow myself to be oppressed in this manner. And I don't think it's good for innovation. Technological innovation gets done by startups, and that seems to work pretty well. For example, in the United States, in France, the rules for making a startup, I understand, are such that it's not so easy. But US, or at least Texas, according to Elon Musk,"
},
{
"end_time": 647.5,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 623.541,
"text": " is a good place for a startup and that's very important but the university world is is much more conformist you know universities are basically uh conservative institutions with tremendous inertia you know i don't believe in big institutions as far as fundamental research or creativity is concerned it's not good it's not what we need but you know there was a renaissance in in europe"
},
{
"end_time": 675.162,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 647.91,
"text": " It was quite remarkable, Renaissance scientifically and artistically, architecturally. There are good periods and bad periods as far as creativity and innovation are concerned. We have a good period for technological innovation, but not for fundamental science. But, you know, these things come and go. Maybe it's AI works and there are robots everywhere and people have more free time. They'll be able to pursue their curiosity instead of struggling for research grants all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 698.968,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 675.776,
"text": " So you're in trouble. There's also the fact that new ideas will be rejected by referees in general. You know, there's a joke that says, which is true though, the worldly wisdom, that it's better to be wrong with the majority than to be right on your own. I think that's certainly the case in the world of science where new ideas are treated viciously. Can you give me an example?"
},
{
"end_time": 721.834,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 699.48,
"text": " To give an example, Lee Van Valen had this wonderful idea for a new principle in evolutionary biology called the Red Queen Principle, which I think is very important, and he couldn't get it published anywhere. So in the end, the way he published it is he created a new journal, probably not just for this paper, where he was the editor-in-chief and he published it himself."
},
{
"end_time": 748.933,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 722.142,
"text": " And this is his greatest contribution to evolutionary biology. And that kind of thing is typical. I think David Reuel, a physicist involved with strange attractors, told me a similar story about his experiences. Now, another example of this is my wife and I were in Singapore once talking to Sydney Brenner at the end of his life. He was in a wheelchair, but his mind was as sharp as ever."
},
{
"end_time": 779.343,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 749.36,
"text": " Sydney Brenner, let me tell you who he is. He has a Nobel Prize, but you know, that doesn't say much. You remember Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, of course, based on sort of stolen x-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin. But anyway, they did it. Well, Watson was silly enough to go back to the US after making this great discovery. He left Cambridge and Crick was left on his own at Cambridge. And the way Crick worked is he needed to talk all day long to someone."
},
{
"end_time": 804.974,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 779.821,
"text": " That someone had been Watson and they would usually talk in a bar, by the way, not at the university, a pub. So Creek needed someone and the person who replaced Watson was Sydney Brenner from South Africa, Cambridge. Sydney Brenner was a great mind and he's not afraid to shock people. And what he said is he has a whole bunch of friends with Nobel prizes and none of them"
},
{
"end_time": 819.821,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 805.282,
"text": " Could have done the work that earned them the Nobel Prize in the current environment and that's a pretty serious condemnation of the current environment. Now technology is doing great, right? I'm talking about fundamental science."
},
{
"end_time": 848.063,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 819.94,
"text": " Can you just briefly define what fundamental science is? And the reason is that there are some people like Sean Carroll, who talk about that there is no crisis in physics, or at least no major crisis in physics, and then they'll cite engineering facts and not fundamental breakthroughs. Well, you've just answered your question, I think rather well. So it's I find it boring. Frankly, I can't believe that nature doesn't have any more imagination. I can't believe that we"
},
{
"end_time": 874.053,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 848.524,
"text": " In the 1920s, found the fundamental theory of physical reality, quantum mechanics, and that's it. And it's all over from now on. If you extrapolate from the history of science, every period has thought that they had sort of final knowledge. They couldn't imagine anything else, of course. But every so many years, there was a paradigm shift. And I'm disappointed that there hasn't been one in the past century. And I suspect it's because"
},
{
"end_time": 891.681,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 874.77,
"text": " The current system doesn't let people come up with a paradigm shift. And if they did, they would never be able to get it published. Let me give you two stories about two people who are not following the current fashion. I'm going to include myself, but let me start with my friend Stephen Wolfram."
},
{
"end_time": 917.056,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 891.971,
"text": " The way steven has been able to remarkable work is just published a series of books on diverse topics that are really very fascinating is because he's not working in a university environment what he did was to create a company and he's a self funding his research needed to create a company because he needed very sophisticated software to do the calculations but it is the way he works the way he does research."
},
{
"end_time": 946.732,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 917.056,
"text": " You know to develop that you had to make it a product that you were selling so that money would come in and you could keep developing the software. It's like what happens with weapons. You know it's very expensive to design say a military fighter jet. And so what countries do what the US does is it sells emasculated version of it to allies. You have to have a larger volume of sales to justify the enormous cost the engineering cost of designing the airplane."
},
{
"end_time": 968.336,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 947.09,
"text": " So you sell versions to get the volumes you need of sales, you sell versions that have deliberately been sort of broken, you know, not all the best features in them. So this is what Stephen, in order to have the tool he needed for his research, made a company and was selling the tool. And after several"
},
{
"end_time": 998.08,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 968.814,
"text": " Decades, he now has a technology stack that is incredibly powerful. In my opinion, it's an artificial intelligence. It's not a neural net artificial intelligence, but it's a, I think, a very substantial artificial intelligence. And, um, and that's the tool he uses in his research. It's a microscope or his telescope. And by the way, Steven is pretty much self-taught. He was publishing papers on what used to be called high energy physics. It used to be called particle physics. Now it's called high energy physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1023.763,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 998.37,
"text": " When he was a teenager, I don't know if he has a degree. Maybe he put a bunch of papers together and Caltech gave him a PhD for that. But he's self-taught. He was a child prodigy. Now forgive me for mentioning myself. I'm also self-taught. I have a high school degree. I don't have a college degree. I only have honorary doctorates."
},
{
"end_time": 1045.862,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1024.343,
"text": " I had a day job and a night job, like artists very often, you know, they work as a waiter during the day and at night they try to do stand-up comedy or some other thing or paint. So my day job was writing software for IBM for new products."
},
{
"end_time": 1075.35,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1046.391,
"text": " My hobby was doing fundamental research. Another approach to this is what Andrew Wiles did to follow the Fermat's last proofs of the Hermat's last theorem, which is that he worked for 10 years in his attic, but he had to keep up a stream of papers. Meanwhile, he would have lost his position as a professor at Princeton. Maybe he hated the fact that he had to do those papers or maybe they were exercises on the way to solving proving Fermat's last theorem that he could separate out and publish those individual papers."
},
{
"end_time": 1102.039,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1075.879,
"text": " There's another phenomena called, what is it, salami publications where you take a piece of work and you divide it into very thin slices and you can have a whole series of papers on the subject. So I think the system is broken. I think the bureaucracy controlling research is too high. I don't think there should be a bureaucracy controlling research. If you look at how Watson encrypted their research at the medical research council in the Cavendish lab,"
},
{
"end_time": 1131.544,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1102.278,
"text": " of Cambridge University. They were protected by Bragg, a Nobel Prize winner, who got funding for his, for the entire Cavendish lab, I believe it was, you know, the three years at a time or more. And within the people who worked, just had to convince him that they were working on some reasonable project. They didn't have to keep constantly applying for grants and writing progress reports and showing deliverables. By the way, this reminds me of Stanislaw Lulam's great film,"
},
{
"end_time": 1157.773,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1131.852,
"text": " Ulam was a mathematician too about a progress report he once wrote and the progress reports said great progress was made on writing this month's progress report. That was his progress report and this was the guy who figured out how to make a hydrogen bomb work. Teller got most of the credit but I think the essential idea was actually Ulam's"
},
{
"end_time": 1183.456,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1158.217,
"text": " Was he saying that sarcastically that great progress is made writing this progress report? Yes, of course. He thought that progress reports were ridiculous. You know, there's also the phenomena that you have, if you apply for a grant, you have to promise what you do, you're going to do in advance. And it's hard to tell if you're doing curiosity based research where you're going to go. So, you know, there's the old trick that you do the research and then you don't tell anybody you apply for a grant for it."
},
{
"end_time": 1194.582,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1184.002,
"text": " But you've already done the research. You know, the system is very badly broken, but we haven't seen, in my opinion, enough fundamental advances since the 1920s."
},
{
"end_time": 1224.787,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1195.418,
"text": " At this point, you may be wondering, like myself, why Greg continually puts the 1920s as the latest revolution in physics. I emailed Greg afterward, saying, Dear Gregory, In our talk, you mentioned that the foundations haven't changed since the 1920s. However, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there were significant developments such as Electroweak Unification, Confinement, and QED. Did you mean to say that there's been no new innovation since the 1970s? Greg then responded, and I have permission to use his voice here,"
},
{
"end_time": 1241.834,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1225.162,
"text": " You have a right to disagree, of course, but seen from a vast distance, the basic quantum framework, the real revolution was the 1920s. At least that's how I see it. To me, the topics you mention are just details. Best, Greg. Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs."
},
{
"end_time": 1267.517,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1242.176,
"text": " But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into… Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer."
},
{
"end_time": 1298.08,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1268.285,
"text": " So to give another example, I think the European community with everything being controlled by bureaucrats in Brussels from the point of view of scientific creativity is awful. I was once in Greece and I asked someone in Greece, how is it that the ancient Greeks were so creative? And he told me, well, they asked themselves the same question. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me where he found the answer, but the answer was that compare Greece with Egypt."
},
{
"end_time": 1323.148,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1298.609,
"text": " Egypt is relatively flat and there was a central authority that was fairly stable that would control all of Egypt and that way Egypt was very stable for a long long time but they're not known for their scientific creativity whereas the Greeks were separated on islands separated by mountains there were many city states that meant that"
},
{
"end_time": 1348.183,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1323.353,
"text": " Many new ideas were possible. Can you tell me about ancient Egypt? Because some people who are listening would say, well, ancient Egypt was tremendously inventive. They, after all, made the pyramids and there's still no consensus as to how the pyramids were developed. Well, the pyramids would show that they were wonderful engineers. But do you have philosophical texts like"
},
{
"end_time": 1375.725,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1348.524,
"text": " Plato's dialogues, for example. Now Aristotle, by the way, one of the great so-called Greek philosophers actually wasn't Greek. That shows that good minds can come from anywhere. But since he was not Greek, he was not really 100% Greek like Plato was. Plato's dialogues are preserved. They're wonderful. You just have to translate them and people are constantly doing that. But Aristotle's works are secondhand."
},
{
"end_time": 1395.469,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1375.981,
"text": " their lecture notes taken by students. One of the important things was that a lot of ancient Greek texts that went through the Islamic world were preserved at the Library of Alexandria, which had a lot of wonderful people. Alexandria is in what is now Egypt."
},
{
"end_time": 1422.637,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1395.708,
"text": " And at one point, this was a tremendous intellectual center, more than Athens. It was such a tremendous intellectual center that Euclid, for example, assembled Euclid's Elements in Alexandria. It had the great library. My dad was in the theater and he said, you write a script, you get together actors, you direct them, you rehearse, and then opening night comes and basically magic has to happen. Sometimes magic happens and sometimes it doesn't."
},
{
"end_time": 1452.312,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1422.961,
"text": " Alexandria was one of these magic places. Previous centuries, it had been Athens, but the people in Athens weren't all from Athens. Some of them came from other Greek city states and became celebrated, attracted attention and went to Athens. The same way that at one period in time, the place to go was Paris. It was a tremendous intellectual hotbed. It's difficult to say why at one point Paris was so fertile artistically at this point in time,"
},
{
"end_time": 1473.933,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1453.217,
"text": " It probably isn't, maybe from one period it was, I don't know, could it have been Berlin? Magic has to happen, it's basically, I don't know, you could have a very scholarly book saying why did the Renaissance take place, and I'm sure there are many reasons, but why was there a wonderful library in Alexandria, for example, which was a gathering point for"
},
{
"end_time": 1490.111,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1474.309,
"text": " The top intellectuals of the period during the great Islamic period, why did they translate texts from ancient or Greek into Arabic, which then made their way into Europe, very often in translations from the Arabic, I believe. I'm not a historian."
},
{
"end_time": 1514.701,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1490.538,
"text": " It's complicated. I don't know why there are periods of creativity, but I think that large centralized bureaucracies that control everything and control research are definitely not good for creativity. They may be good for technological innovation, although I think the universities are not the great innovators. I think it's mostly small startup firms that are tremendous innovators technologically."
},
{
"end_time": 1539.445,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1519.428,
"text": " That sounds like something that AI can solve."
},
{
"end_time": 1565.674,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1540.384,
"text": " Well, I'm not sure I can solve everything except for a robot car. For giving the progress reports, why can't you just feed an LLM your research and say, generate for me a progress report that fits this template? Well, I don't see why you have to write a progress report. You just want to have a paper at the end. Progress report. I see. Just gets in your way. So what you want to do is you want to split up the European community into separate nations."
},
{
"end_time": 1579.428,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1565.964,
"text": " Because then there will be a school of physics in France, there'll be a school of physics in Italy, there'll be a school of physics in Germany, and they can be different. But now when you have a bureaucracy, a centralized bureaucracy in Brussels and you have"
},
{
"end_time": 1599.326,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1579.821,
"text": " European committees that decide what gets funded, this tends to make uniform everything and people only work on the fashionable subjects. So from that point of view, the United States should be split up by the way that may happen by itself, given the current mess in the politics there. But if each state"
},
{
"end_time": 1616.954,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1599.701,
"text": " Instead of having a National Science Foundation in Washington, you know, many states in the United States could be a country in Europe. And from the point of view of creativity, it's good to have many places with different trying out different ideas because otherwise it's uniform. Everybody's working on the same fashionable ideas."
},
{
"end_time": 1646.049,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1617.261,
"text": " And then you have this phenomenon, as I said, that people think it's better to be wrong with the majority than to be right on by yourself. Sabin Hassenfelder, by the way, did a podcast saying why she stopped doing physics and started doing podcasts. Her description of the system is rather horrendous. So I couldn't work in the current environment. I was doing my research as a hobby and, and working on something much easier, which is writing software."
},
{
"end_time": 1670.162,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1646.493,
"text": " I wouldn't have been able to get grants for the research I was doing, and Stephen Wolfram made his own company to fund his own research. You have to be very good to pull that off, but he of course has done it brilliantly. And in the old days, let me give another example that's more familiar to French people than to people outside of France. There was a great scientist called Louis Pasteur,"
},
{
"end_time": 1696.681,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1670.691,
"text": " Now Pasteur was not part of the university system in France. He created the Institut Pasteur and it was supported by contributions and subscriptions that he got based on his spectacular research that was of great value to France, by the way. I'm afraid I sound a little old and tired, but what I'm trying to convey is that another fact is that the best age for fundamental innovation is when you're in high school."
},
{
"end_time": 1722.278,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1697.312,
"text": " Because afterwards you start being brainwashed. Steven and I were chatting to each other about that. Afterwards, if you continue on to the university, you start being brainwashed with the current, what is it called? The current fashions, the current paradigms. Right. And so if you want to come up with really innovative ideas that can go off in your directions, if you don't have them in high school, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 1752.5,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1722.688,
"text": " Stephen has a summer camp for high school students where he feels it's the last stage at which he can influence, really influence people because afterwards they get caught in the system. I know you may, you yourself may be an example because you were a physicist, right? You know a lot of physics, but as far as I can tell, you're not at the university. You're doing a wonderful series of podcasts. So this is an example. We're all examples of people who don't fit into the current system."
},
{
"end_time": 1780.06,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1752.807,
"text": " Einstein, for example, when he did his work, his best ideas were when he was working in the Swiss patent office. He wasn't in a university. He had trouble getting a position. He couldn't get a position. And he was working in the Swiss patent office. And from what I've heard, there wasn't much work in the Swiss patent office. So he could actually work on his own things. The first miracle is that he came up with three incredible papers in 1905, right? The photoelectric effect,"
},
{
"end_time": 1809.206,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1780.742,
"text": " There's also a special relativity and then the energy mass equivalence. But the real miracle is that this nobody, this unknown, you know, ridiculous government job, these papers were published in the finest physics journal in Germany. Well, there were there weren't many and Alan, their physique. At that time, there were very few journals. And the person who made the decision to publish them. And this is the real miracle was Max Planck. And for Einstein was always grateful to Max Planck."
},
{
"end_time": 1829.94,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1809.616,
"text": " publishing those papers."
},
{
"end_time": 1854.497,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1830.333,
"text": " Well, no, at first, I think Planck apologized for the photoelectric effect because people didn't believe it. They thought it was an interesting idea, but it was too revolutionary. The idea that Maxwell's equations and waves could also be particles and something discrete. So that was perhaps his most revolutionary paper."
},
{
"end_time": 1879.906,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1854.718,
"text": " The three the stuff on special activity had almost been done by poincare if maxwell had lived maybe he would have done it that's another example of somebody outside the system a rebel an unconventional person and the miracle is that his paper nowadays nobody would publish papers from somebody like that even if they were wonderful especially if they were wonderful because the referees would would say. This is nonsense you know i don't believe this."
},
{
"end_time": 1898.285,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1880.213,
"text": " Another problem is that experiments which are not in accordance with existing theory are rejected. You can't publish them. Now those are precisely the experiments that could lead to new physics. I'm in particular referring to one of my hobby horses, which is called fusion. I think there's"
},
{
"end_time": 1926.664,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1898.831,
"text": " Ample experimental evidence of some unusual phenomena taking place and actually there have been experiments pointing in that direction for many many years going back probably to the nineteen twenties or something but they're dismissed out of hand now that's exactly the wrong attitude when an experiment goes against the current theories you shouldn't say we're not publishing this it must be a mistake the experimenter must be fooling himself or herself"
},
{
"end_time": 1952.807,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1927.073,
"text": " That's the wrong thing to do. What you just said, what you just say is how interesting maybe this is pointing the way to new physics. That's when you want to do fundamental advances in physics, but the current system doesn't want to do fundamental physics. You know, it's a play safe system where you publish papers that a group of people will approve of the referees. And, you know, having a committee decide something"
},
{
"end_time": 1979.548,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1953.2,
"text": " It's a very bad idea. Somebody once said the intelligence of a committee is the intelligence of the stupidest member of the committee because you have to make compromises in order for the committee to come to a decision. So in other words, I'm a romantic. I believe in individuals working outside the system and coming up with fundamental advances. And it was better when science was a hobby. Now that science is big business, there's too much money involved."
},
{
"end_time": 2009.923,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1980.077,
"text": " You know, when nuclear physics was being developed in the 30s, 1930s, by Enrico Fermi and some other people, talking about the nucleus of the atom was like wanting to write poetry in ancient Greek. After the war, the situation changed because then it was weapons development. This is all very unfortunate from the point of view of fundamental advances. Technology has advanced in a very impressive fashion in the last, I don't know, since the Second World War. You know, that makes us like the Romans."
},
{
"end_time": 2034.838,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2010.35,
"text": " If you look back in history, the Romans were great engineers and great administrators. What was it called? La Pax Romana, the piece imposed by the Roman Empire. The Greeks were always fighting each other, the different city-states. They were much more innovative. They came up with, I think, many more ideas. In fact, I think the Romans used Greek slaves. They were the intellectuals in the Roman Empire, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 2056.766,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2035.213,
"text": " Very often. So we're in a Roman period where up to the Second World War, I think, was a period of fundamental innovation. Strangely enough, a lot of, for example, Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's work on uncomputability was done in the 30s between the First World War and the Second World War in Europe, which was a period of tremendous chaos."
},
{
"end_time": 2078.097,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2057.056,
"text": " between the two wars. One war had been a disaster and another war was about to begin. Nevertheless, that very fundamental work was done in pure mathematics that my work is based on. Since the Second World War, science has become big business. It's not a hobby anymore for a small group that really loves it and does it only out of curiosity."
},
{
"end_time": 2108.268,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2078.507,
"text": " And I think that has that has destroyed fundamental innovation in my opinion. But of course, you know, I'm an oddball. My friends are oddballs. Stephen Wolfram is a very successful oddball. I admire him greatly. I can't believe that I think that nature has more imagination than we do. And I don't see why this particular point in time has found the final fundamental theory of physical reality. It's just the current way things are done."
},
{
"end_time": 2129.821,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2108.66,
"text": " It's not helping to allow people to come up with new ideas and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to get them published unless they self publish or something. Steven publishes his own books, he has a publishing company. So I hope that maybe if people stop having children, the human population will go down and universities will become small again"
},
{
"end_time": 2151.254,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2130.35,
"text": " And governments will not be pouring money into universities to fund the research they want instead of allowing the professors to be driven by their curiosity. And maybe there'll be a revival of fundamental research. You know, these things come in cycles. There are periods of history, like the Roman Empire, where the engineering work was extremely good."
},
{
"end_time": 2179.224,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2151.63,
"text": " and periods where fundamental ideas like the ancient Greeks thrived. But the ancient Greeks are not known for their, you know, the engineering projects that have lasted millennia, like some of the Roman roads, which are still in perfect condition in Europe. So I think we're going through a bad period as far as fundamental research is concerned. As far as technology is concerned, we're doing, I think, pretty well. But I think the human race deserves better."
},
{
"end_time": 2201.834,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2179.855,
"text": " The human spirit is capable of more than this. It's just that human creativity and imagination is being suppressed by the current system. So you think we're at a peak of application and a trough of innovation? Absolutely. Thank you, Professor. Thank you for this presentation. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 2219.07,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2204.087,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymungle.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": 2244.65,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2219.292,
"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": 2264.002,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2244.65,
"text": " 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"
},
{
"end_time": 2286.152,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2264.206,
"text": " 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."
},
{
"end_time": 2301.22,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2286.152,
"text": " All you have"
},
{
"end_time": 2324.684,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2301.22,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 2342.244,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2324.684,
"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."
}
]
}No transcript available.