Audio Player
Starting at:
John Moffat on Modified Gravity, Theories of Everything, and meeting Schrödinger
August 20, 2020
•
2:12:35
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
ℹ️ Timestamps visible: Timestamps may be inaccurate if the MP3 has dynamically injected ads. Hide timestamps.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
275 sentences
14,585 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 130m 11s
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. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
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.
Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants.
All right. Hello, Toll listeners. Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now.
Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over
But in my opinion, they're not going to detect the dark matter.
I'm here with Professor John Moffat. Part of what I'm doing with this channel, as well as this documentary, is to place people who I think have gotten not as much press as they should. You've heard of Lee Smolin. You've heard of Eric Weinstein, especially from the intellectual dark web. You've heard of Sabine Hassenfelder because of her YouTube channel. But not many people have heard
at least in the public have heard of John Moffat and he deserves just as much credit. He's put out quite a few theories and not many people put out even one theory. They usually develop an existing theory. So I'm super excited to meet with John in person. John, how are you doing? Very good. Thank you. Let's hear about your modified theory of gravity. So this non-symmetric theory, which I worked on,
I decided that the anti-symmetric part of this metric tensor was not the electromagnetic field. It was additional degrees of freedom for gravity. It was part of the gravitational field, okay? And so I called it the non-symmetric gravitational theory. Now comes the first acronym, NGT.
Let me just break this down for the audience quickly. So in general, relativity of the two tensor, as I was saying before, then you have the symmetric. It's a symmetric tensor, but any tensor can be broken up into a symmetric and an anti-symmetric part. You can decompose it much like you can with coordinates. There's an x and y. Or if you know about principal bundles, there's a horizontal vertical part. So you can decompose. So you can decompose a tensor into a symmetric and anti-symmetric part. Anti-symmetric part is just zero in the Einstein field equations, typically.
And what Moffat is working on or was working on was realizing that this anti-symmetric part, which Einstein also tried to work on, doesn't represent electromagnetism, which is why Einstein threw it out because he was trying to make it fit. You're like, wait, maybe it's not electromagnetism, but it's something else. OK. And you can correct me if I'm incorrect. Very good. Perfect. That's a succinct description.
So I published a paper in physical review, 1979, called A New Theory of Gravitation. What you do in theoretical physics is the following. You have an idea. As Richard Feynman said, you guess an idea. Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law.
In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we comp- Well, don't laugh. That's really true. And, okay, you have this idea. It takes seconds to have the idea, okay? But then you have to formulate it in terms of a mathematical system, mathematical equations. Okay? So you do that. And it has to be self-consistent. And then you have to
And the latter part, the third phase, is very important because you have to know whether it's correct or not experimentally. It's physics. You're doing physics, not just mathematics. And if it doesn't fit the data, then you throw away that guess, that idea.
and you start some other idea or you quit. And this is how physics is done. So I had tried to find some way of verifying this non-symmetric gravity theory. It's not easy. Doing experimental gravity physics is difficult. Of course, I had to agree with Einstein's theory of gravity. That's the first
necessary thing to find is correct. If it doesn't agree with presently soil experimental data, for example, then the whole thing is off. Also, there were some
People criticize it too, just you have to have criticism. Physics is a very conservative business. You do not change the paradigm in physics unless you absolutely have to. And it's the paradigm shift is usually driven by experimental physics. Some, the present theory, so-called standard theory. By the way, I don't like that I went standard, but anyway, standard theory doesn't agree with some data.
or a theory comes forward that makes a prediction and your theory fits the data, that prediction fits, but the older theory doesn't. This is how physics progresses. And so also at this point, this was 1979, so I worked on this in the 1980s. I had students working on
and for example I had Neil Cornish graduate student who was from Australia and he's now professor at the University of Montana. He's a senior professor there, head of a gravitational physics group and
So we worked on this and I had a potential solution for a black hole which did not have a horizon. Using your modified theory? Using this modified theory. A black hole with no horizon? That's right. Konish applied for a position at Cambridge University to be Stephen Hawking's assistant and he became his assistant
It's quite a funny story because as Neil told me later, he was sitting in one of the rooms of the Department of Applied Mathematics, the Silver Street, Cambridge, where Hawking was, and he's looking at the blackboard, at a blackboard, and he suddenly hears this voice, computer voice,
Ah, so you're Neil Cornish. So you don't believe in black holes, I believe. That was his first thing. So anyway, so this is the 80s. So I started, then I started doing particle physics again and left it for a while. I worked on unified theory again with another graduate student, David Ball.
who ended up as a professor at the University of British Columbia. He was chair, actually, of the department at one point. David Bowen, BOL, and also with Gabor Kunstatter, who became professor and dean of science at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. We worked on this stuff, but there was no clear experimental evidence that could prove it.
You have to have one piece of some prediction, something that you have in your theory that cannot be fitted by the other theories. This is very difficult. This doesn't happen often in physics. Maxwell's prediction that light has to move as an electromagnetic wave with the speed of light is a prediction which hurts.
physicists proved experimentally to be correct. This is a remarkable result. Dirac, Dirac equation, one of the fundamental equations of quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum physics, predicted antimatter. They went and looked for antimatter, and then some Caltech found in 1932. This is an amazing prediction, see?
This happens a few times in physics. Einstein's theory of general relativity had to pass the solar system experiments. And the bending of light, of course, 1.575 arc seconds, the bending of light by the sun. The first eclipse experiments were not all that great, actually.
and time had to go on before we had a really confirmation of the bending of light prediction by Einstein. And the Perigee advance of Mercury, this is the Rosetta precession of Mercury's orbit. Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun and it precesses in a reticence or set shape, which confounded Newtonian gravity
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock.
Where does your modified theory come in?
If you observe Doppler shifts, light coming and going, blue shift and red shift, and from these observations you can determine how fast stars are moving around in the galaxy, in any galaxy, and they found with great surprise that the stars were moving faster than could be accounted for by Newtonian gravity. If you plot the rotation curve
of the speed, velocity, vertical axis versus the distance of the sides of the star from the centre are equal to zero radially, then the curve comes up and flattens out, whereas your towing gravity predicts that it should fall off, okay, and there's quite a six times
The difference between Newtonian gravity and this flat rotation curve experimentally, observationally, is a factor of six. And that's confined to a galaxy. That's what happens in our galaxy. Well, the reason I'm saying that is because we're gravitationally pulled by some other galaxy. So if that curve extended out extremely far, then we should be spinning. You get back to Newtonian gravity. You must go as you go out towards infinity.
So it flattens out and then comes back down again. So this intrigued me because Einstein gravity contains Newtonian gravity and we effectively use Newtonian gravity for galaxies because the gravitational field is weak. All experiments on gravity are for weak gravitational fields. The solar system is weak gravity
except for neutron stars. Einstein knew that it doesn't work. Dark matter. What is this? In the 70s, the first astronomer to note this problem was Zwicky in 1933, a Swiss astronomer, rather a century character. He has his name on virtually every aspect of physics.
did some calculation for what are called clusters. These are clusters of galaxies, not stars. Galaxies containing stars. And these clusters are huge. And he found that by what's called the Virial Theorem that if you use Newtonian gravity, they can't be stable. They have to blow apart. Gravity is not sufficiently strong to maintain
equilibrium, stability. So he said, well, there's got to be extra dark matter. And that's it already 1933 and so on. But no one paid much attention to it. But because of Vera Rubin and the problem with the galaxies, now things became serious. And more and more attention was paid to this dark matter. And now it's
to me, in my opinion, one of the major problems of modern physics, because due to the standard cosmology, which I will get into the standard cosmological model, dark matter plays an essential role. 85, 86% of all matter is dark matter, according to fitting the data, cosmological data. So
After decades of effort and large sums of money, millions, billions of dollars, one experiment after another, they've been looking for dark matter particles and no one can detect them, no one has detected them. So what does this mean? I call it potentially the modern ether,
because ether was accepted as being a fact at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century it was a fact because you had to have electromagnetic waves move through some medium like sound moves through air as a medium. Maxwell believed in the ether. So what does your modified theory of gravity say about dark matter?
decided to say that the anti-symmetric part of my gravity theory was the part of gravity that modifies gravity without dark matter, you see, because the first modification of gravity, a serious modification,
was Isaac Newton. It was Albert Einstein who modified Isaac Newton's gravitational theory published in 1687 in the Procipia. And so I'm modifying Einstein. Einstein is failing. Newtonian and Einstein are failing. They cannot describe this
issue without inventing invisible matter. But one is always agnostic in physics. If you can find the dark matter next month, these huge experiments that are still ongoing, trying to detect what's called WIMPs, weakly interacting matter particles,
If they find that it fits in and they can explain the rotation curves of the galaxies, then forget about modified gravity. Einstein's theory of gravity is a beautiful theory. It fits the data and that's it. But in my opinion, they're not going to detect the dark matter because it doesn't exist. That's my personal opinion.
So I published papers doing this, identifying this anti-symmetric part with them as a new degree of freedom and gravity so that I could fit the galaxy rotation curves, the flattening of the curves, without dark matter. And I did, okay. And I published a paper in 1995, physical letters B doing this.
But astronomers complained because non-symmetric gravity theory is complicated, and astronomers don't like this complication. So I said, all right, I'll produce a simpler version. So I produced what's called MSTG, Metric Skew Symmetric Gravity. Is it taking the previous version and making it a simpler theory?
When you say it's simpler, what are you sacrificing for the simplicity? I'm sacrificing a lot of the mathematical mathematics. I made it into a simpler version by means of throwing out a lot of the complicated nonlinear mathematics. Okay, so the way that I'm imagining it is like a Taylor expansion. You just take the linear part and just remove the higher part. Exactly right.
So then I've published papers with this on dark matter. I simplified it again because the astronomer was still complaining it. So I said, OK, I'll make it simpler. So now we're down to scalar tensor vector gravity, STVG. And this consists of taking Einstein's theory. You've got to have Einstein's theory as a base. Otherwise, it's not going to work.
When you say you have it as a base, you mean you derive it in a limit like Newtonian's driving? That's correct, exactly. You have to do that. Einstein was confounded by the fact that he couldn't get Newtonian gravity over a period of a year or two. He gave up at one point, but then he went back in with Grossman and eventually they got around to getting what's called the Poisson equation and Newtonian gravity as a limit.
natural limit of Einstein gravity. So I had to have this. So it's okay. So now I have a theory where I need a stronger gravity. So I made big G, I call it big G, Newton's constant. I made it a variable constant. Interesting. And following what Paul Dirac did in 1938, Proceedings of Royal Society,
You also have a variable speed of light? Is that tied to the variable g? That's another theory. So, by the way, the photon of gravity, the quantum, the photons in quotes, is the graviton. The graviton is the quantum particle that is exchanged between
particles, matter particles, and produces Newtonian gravity or Einstein gravity. Electrodynamics, Maxwell's electrodynamics is a relativistic version of Maxwell's theory. The photon is exchanged between electrons to produce the Coulomb force. So the graviton is the photon. No one's ever detected a graviton and probably no one ever will because gravity is so weak
He would take the whole galaxy as an accelerator to detect a graviton. As Freeman Dyson said, if you have a big enough mass to detect a graviton, that mass would collapse to a black hole. Anyway, that's the theory, okay, the graviton. So here I have the metric tensor field of Einstein
And I have a new degree of freedom, the vector field. And the vector field corresponds to a spin-1 graviton, or a symmetric tensor, g-menu, corresponds to a spin-2 graviton. So I complete gravity theory with an extra graviton, spin-1 graviton. And this vector field is sourced by matter, by mass. So the electromagnetic potential
A mu of Maxwell's equations is sourced by electric charge. My vector field is sourced by mass, just like Einstein's metric field theory is field is sourced by mass, by density of matter. So that's affected to the theory. And I wrote it up and published it in 2006. And eventually,
I started calling it MOG, Modified Gravity, because more than Mordecai Milgram in Israel, he was the first to publish a modification of Newtonian gravity, called MON, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, in 1983. And he's a pioneer to do this, because
People were critical, I mean, you know, modifying Einstein gravity. So, this is MOND. But MOND is a non-relativistic formula. It's not relativistic. It's just a modification. It's a modification of Newtonian gravity, and it's based on assuming that there's a special acceleration, a sub zero, a for acceleration.
Even if MOND had correct predictions, it would still be incomplete because how does it comport with the general relativity would be the open question? Because people attempted to
generalized this non-relativistic phenomenological formula, a simple formula. By the way, astronomers like this simple formula. Astronomers like the simple math. So, it's a high school level formula, okay. So, it's not a sense, my sense of humor is
I call it MOG, instead of MOND. But this is silly. It's important to call it MOG because it's modifying gravity as opposed to modifying Newtonian dynamics. So you've got to have general relativity
Okay, so the big question everyone wants to know, and the experimentalists are watching this, is do you make predictions that agree with the data? Okay, so back to the three phases of physics. Have an idea, guess it. Mathematical formulation, STVG, publish it. Now comes what I call, I call it physics imagination in a straight jacket. Imagination, the idea,
The straight jacket is experimental physics. Can you agree with experimental physics? Can you predict something that the other people can't fit? It's hard. That's why physics is so hard. Because when I paint, I still paint. There's no criteria you have to match. No, I don't think it's all left
It's all right brain, more or less, your feelings, color, composition. So I finish, put it up on the wall, and you either like it or you don't like it. I don't have to prove anything. I don't have to prove the painting. It's not from logic, I don't have to prove it. Just if you don't like it, well, okay. Maybe you don't like this painting. But in physics, the test is the experiment.
And this is what makes physics so hard. It's very challenging. That's why I like it, OK? So OK, moving forward, one paper after another. I've been publishing papers now for 14 years. STVG was published in 2006. So then in 2015, I published a pair of long paper
mog black holes, because I found a black hole solution. And I call them mog black holes. I call them Schwarzschild mog black holes or Kerr mog black holes. Kerr, my former collaborator and friend from Trinity. And there's been a lot of, I've lost track how many papers are published
Okay, great, because one of my questions was what's the reception like from the physics community? There must be, I don't know, I'm guessing 50, 60 papers. That's a lot of citations, hundreds of citations in fact. I'm up to something like 6,000, 7,000 citations. Holy moly. Yeah. There's something called Research Gate.
which is a portal. Congrats on that. So I'm up to something like 11,000 readerships. Holy moly. Yeah. So a lot of people know me from my physics, but this paper I just sent you, just from Chinese, from China. That just got published yesterday. It's on the archive. It'll be published eventually. It's a very
Very good paper, because I published it in my big paper on Mark Blackhall's, published the European physical journal See, and this is a major European journal in 2016 and subsequent papers. I published a solution of my modified gravity theory for an object
which may not have horizons and is regular. It does not have any singularity at the center. It's completely regular. Interesting. But it's close to having a horizon because there's a critical, in the development, there's a free parameter called alpha in the mathematics of the metric describing my black hole.
And this alpha is a deviation parameter. It deviates the theory from Einstein black holes, the size of alpha. When alpha is zero, you get Einstein black holes. When alpha is non-zero, you don't, OK? So in addition to the black hole with a horizon, actually, my solution always has two horizons.
The parameters are just mass and spin, and alpha, three parameters, that's it. So, I published a... No charge, mass, spin and alpha, no charge. No electric charge. By the way, blind holes, astrophysical bodies do not have electric charge. They're electrically neutral, because
You have positive charge electrons, and you have positive and negative charge, clumps of charge, right? And they neutralize one another. I mean, this is electrically neutral. All astrophysical bodies are electrically neutral. The Sun is electrically neutral. There may be a tiny amount of charge, but it's negligible. So it has very little, if any, effect on space-time metric.
through Maxwell-Einstein equations. This is for astrophysics. So black holes should be electrically neutral. Papers are published showing this is the case. They neutralize. So they discharge their charge. So this theory is just mass. But mass is positive. It doesn't have a negative counterpart. There's no negative mass.
By the way, if someone is interested and they have a penchant for mathematics as well as physics and they want to learn about your theory, do they just read the papers or do you have a book that you published, much like there are books that introduce someone to general relativity from nothing? No, I haven't actually published
a textbook on this. I'm too busy working out the theory. I do these, but I just dictate them. But doing a textbook is much more complicated because you have to deal with all the equations and this. But eventually I hope to get a review. But there was a review published by Daniela Perez and
Gustav Romero, they're at the Institute for Physics in Argentina and they published a whole large big review of my MOG in a book. What do you think of current theories of everything? Are they missing some key ingredient? Are they missing that they're trying to unify GR as it is and they're not unifying MOG? Or is there something else that you feel like they're lacking?
Okay, well, there's a long history to this. We just talked about Unified Theory, way back, Harmon Weill and Albert Einstein, 1918. But yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. There's loop, there's m-theory. I'm happy with this, this toe, the acronym toe, because what does it mean to have a theory of everything? I mean,
What? Everything? I mean the whole universe? Biochemistry? Chemistry? Consciousness? I don't know. What does it mean to have a theory? I don't understand what that means. So you much prefer grand unified theory than total? Grand unified theory. Grand unified theory somehow tied in with gravity. Have you had a chance to look at the Eric Weinstein video that I sent you?
Yeah, I didn't understand it. You have to ask him about that. What about Stephen Wolfram? Have you heard of Stephen? I appreciate that they both made a lot of money. Apparently, Eric Weinstein is manager of a gauge fund, Netron fund in New York. So he's also a mathematician.
So he has fun with it. But these theories have not been successful. Quantum gravity, let's talk about that for a minute, because I've published papers on quantum gravity. I tried to publish on all of these things and several papers actually over the years, quite well cited actually. I published one paper in 2000
called non-commutative quantum gravity, which has many citations. So you have the coordinates of space-time not commuting by momentum and position in quantum mechanics, non-commutative. Non-commutative gravity? Yeah. Moffat, okay. The problem with quantum gravity is that there are no data. Okay, let me repeat that.
There are no quantum gravity data. And you can't do physics without data. That is my main criticism. There may be. I mean, I'm not saying there won't be. But as of August 2020, there are no... Let's put it this way. In quantum field theory, Feynman graphs describe what's going on. Relativistic quantum field theory.
So you have what's called tree graphs, these are trees, okay, so you have a line here and you have a line there, these are two electrons and they interchange the photon which is a quigley line and it's just trees. But that's classical electromagnetism, it's classical electrodynamics, tree graphs. So the quantum comes in with what's called loops,
So now you begin to take the lines and make them into loops, close in on loops, OK? And these loops are the quantum corrections to the classical tree graphs, OK? So let's go to gravity. In gravity, you have a neutron, two neutrons or two electrons. And they have mass, so the mass
causes a graviton to be interchanged between the two massive electrons or protons, whatever. And that's classical. I can then derive from that tree graph, a graviton and two protons. I can derive Newton-Newton's law of gravity. I want to ask where law
dealing with getting general activities a different business. And the loops, quantum gravity comes in when I form these loops, which are proportional to Planck's constant. Now Planck's constant comes in to the game. And these are called self-energy loops. So they're loop graphs. And there is no experiment that can determine these loop graphs. None.
This is where the quantum gravity comes in. So you construct a theory of gravity, quantum gravity, you know, there are lots of, there's a loop quantum gravity where you take space-time and make it into little pieces, atomic pieces, lattices, and you then try to get general relativity coming, emerging out of this.
spin network and all that. There's string theory where you have these strings like violin strings and one of the strings is I spin to a graviton so I did these strings oscillate and the strings are not points in space time
So your issue is that they're theorizing with no constraints because there's not much data? Yes, so string theory has to be formulated in 10 dimensions or 11, otherwise it's not self-consistent. And you have to have supersymmetry. Supersymmetry has to come in, otherwise it's not self-consistent, physically speaking. What's the difference between being self-consistent and being consistent? Well, for example, you need
more dimensions in string theory. Otherwise, the Lorentz algebra doesn't close. It's not Lorentz invariant. It's because the string is a surface. It's not a point. And so then I worked in string theory. I once gave a course of summer lectures at the University of Western Ontario in London for students. And I published it actually. And that turned me off string theory.
In fact, the claim is that string theory is finite to all orders of perturbation theory. So you take my tree graphs and my loops and you do what's called perturbation theory. The loops are perturbations on the string, on the tree graphs. And the string theory, these loops are supposed to be finite, whereas in standard quantum electron dynamics or quantum field theory,
They lead to divergences. So you have to renormalize the loops. You have to take one infinity and subtract it from another to get a finite result. So the gravities, by the way, gravity is not renormalizable. This was proved by Toft and Veltman and others in the 70s. And this was a big problem.
And so it doesn't behave like other standard quantum field theories in particle physics. And so it's not really normal. It's just divergences. You can't get rid of them. So this is what loop chronograph is supposed to deal with. And string theory is supposed to be finite. But I discovered that I wasn't convinced that string theory is finite. There was never any rigorous proof that string theory is finite. Still up to this day?
And so let's get to the phase three. What about testing these theories? Well, string theory was a theory of everything, supposedly, at all. That's where the acronym came from. And Edward Witten and so forth in the 80s claimed that this is the theory of everything, everything in particle physics.
So, well, no one's ever detected a higher dimension beyond three spatial dimensions. Time is a dimension, but there's just space-time clocks versus rods. And okay, so we've never seen a higher dimension. The Large Hadron Colliders looked for them for years and find nothing, no experimental data.
Okay, supersymmetry, we need supersymmetry to make the fermion sector or string theory consistent. There are reasons why I say consistent, but let's go on. So they've counted for supersymmetry for years, LVC. We know supersymmetry doesn't exist up to about 3 TeV, 3 or 4 TeV, and so it's got to exist
below one TV to really solve a lot of supersymmetric problems. So that's all gone. Okay. There's no evidence from supersymmetry. So the Large Hadron Collider is at 14 TV. I was been working at 13, 14, 13 TV, and they hope to get it up to 14 TV with even beyond that.
but you know the supersymmetric particles keep getting heavier and heavier and we can't detect them so that's gone so what's left of string theory okay there's no experimental test of string theory that you can say well this experiment's done and it passes this test and no other theory no theory without supersymmetry can fit that data
This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes, and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from
any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,
You modified gravity. Have you worked on modifying QFT? Okay, so another
the standard model. Why I formulate alternatives is not because I'm trying to be a difficult person. I'm just curious about how stable, how true the so-called standard model is. How robust is it? So that's why I also I'm mentally somewhat lazy. I can't just sit and read someone's textbook.
So in order to learn a theory, I produce another theory. And through this, I can't produce another theory unless I really understand the so-called standard model theory. And that makes me, forces me to understand it. So this is a strange mental way of proceeding, but that's why all these alternatives come out, because I'm trying to understand the standard model by producing another one.
The way that I analogize it is that it would be as if someone can't watch movies or can't understand movies so they're like let me make my own movie and then I got to watch this movie and understand how this director made it in order for me to make mine and that's my actual goal is to understand this director. That's right, exactly.
So then I got interested in the fact of renormalization theory. I mean, I published papers on particle physics after doing my PhD. So I've been doing this for years. I have PhD students working just on particle physics, quark physics.
I had 38 graduate students, by the way, who did PhDs. That's quite a lot. So I was interested in the following. Can you develop a theory which is ultraviolet complete, UV complete? In other words, in standard quantum field theory, these loops I was talking about,
They have divergences, they're called ultraviolet, ultraviolet divergences and they have to be cancelled using renormalisation theory. So you do what's called charge and mass renormalisation and Dirac never liked renormalisation theory. He thought it was, it was unsatisfactory, it's rather artificial. You take one set of infinities and subtract from another
You know, why do you add these infinities in the first place? Feynman, in the 80s, he was interviewed. He said he wasn't satisfied with normalization theory, even though he was one of the inventors with his Nobel Prize in quantum mechanics. And so I constructed a different quantum field theory. So instead of having
or three lines meeting at a point. It's called a vertex, okay? And that's where these three particles interact, at the point. So in local quantum field theory, they interact at a point. And this point is effectively described by delta function. Invented by Dirac, by the way. We didn't like renormalization theory.
And as Feynman already understood in his paper from 1947, 1950, already there you already have a problem. As soon as you introduce the delta function and the point for the Feynman graphs, you get subvergence immediately. So, delta function in mathematics is what's called a distribution. You know, you get into distribution theory.
So I thought, well, I'm going to give a different distribution at a point. So I use what's called the entire function. Entire function of mathematics, entire function. Time function is a digit for a distribution has an infinite number of derivatives. It has in the complex momentum square plane. There are no poles.
But there's a central singularity of infinity. That's the only singularity. So it's an infinite Taylor series of derivatives. So it's infinite derivative theory, OK? And so it becomes non-local. The operators become non-local. So I have a non-local field theory. But I stress that I published this, that I proved that even though the operator field operators are non-local,
The theory does not violate microcosality. Microcosality is the commutator of a field at two different points, and they're supposed to vanish for space-like separation outside the light cone. And I proved that this is, even though the field operators are non-local,
They still have these vanishing commutators outside the lake cone. So the theory is local, is local, even though it's called non-local. The actual result in the end is local. That's interesting. So I published a paper in 1989, physical review, a long paper during this. What's the reception been like? Proved that it was finite to all orders. It was unitary to all orders.
What's the reception been like? Okay, so Richard Woodard, I got to know him. He's a professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. This was 1990. So he came up to Toronto to give some lectures. I invited him up. He said, what are you doing? I said, non-local field theory. What? He said, well, that can't work. I said, well, I'm publishing this paper. So
So six weeks later in comes an email we were already emailing then saying I've had epiphany epiphany I think this is really interesting let's collaborate so we collaborated with myself and his student and my student my postdoc and we published a long paper in physical review
where we did quantum electrodynamics from start to finish everything and proved that the theory is unitary to all this is s matrix it's unitary orders all the perturbation loops of finite orders and the tree graphs work and that so we really went to town on this so that paper's had many citations okay right so
People are publishing, just the other day a paper came out, they're coming out citing my papers. I've had hundreds of citations on this. So I got back into this recently because I switched, I thought I'd be done enough black holes and gravity, let's do some particle physics for a change.
So I look back into the standard model and the Higgs particle has been discovered. The discovery of the Higgs particle is, the narrative for that is in my book, Cracking the Particle Court of the Universe, Oxford University Press, no, Tom Collins, Harper Collins. It says Oxford on something. Yeah, yeah. So
So what you do is you have, the strong nuclear force is called quantum chromodynamics, and you have clocks, all the clocks, and the photon in this case, the quantum is the gluon, and the gluon is colored. And when you say photon in quotations, you mean the particle that mediates the force? The medium of the force. The mediator of the force.
And then you have electromagnetism, electrothermics, QED is called, and you have electroweak, and these are put together, were put together by Clashow and basically as SU3 cos SU2 cos U1. SU3 is the colour, nuclear force, strong force group
SU2 is the... SU2 cross U1 is the... Electroweak. Electroweak. And the U1 is the electromagnetism. So these are the three forces of nature put together in this, it's called simple group. And why is it SU3 cross SU2 cross U1? So how do they do this? Okay, well, in order to get a renormalizable theory,
We use a delta function for the graph, Feynman graphs at the point, local field theory. You need a gauge theory. The theory has to be gauge invariant. And corner electron dynamics is gauge invariant because the photon is massless. So massless theories are gauge invariant, and gauge invariant theories are normalizable.
Now the quantum chromodynamics, SU3, the gluons are massless. Hooray! We have a gauge theory. All right. It's renormalizable. It's called QCD, quantum chromodynamics. What about the weak force? There's always been a problem. So the weak force, these forces are described by, fields are described by Yang-Gou's theory.
Yang-Mills theory is what's called in mathematics a non-abelian gauge theory. It's gauge theory. The particle mediating particles are matchless. Okay, so for a long time the problem was that the electric weak is not matchless because the mediating particles are the z or the z.
bosons and the W bosons. There are three of them. Two W charged and one neutral. They're not massless. In fact, they're thick masses. And the fermions are not massless. The electron is in quarks. The top quark is the heaviest quark is 173 GeV compared to the electron which has a mass of half a MeV. So
Okay, so SU211 is not a gauging variant, so it can't be renormalized. You can prove this. What to do? This took a long time. So, the scalar field was invented, the Higgs field, which has the quantum numbers of the vacuum. So,
what they had to do was to say that the electroweak starts with zero mass so we put all the masses to zero the w the z and the photons zero mass okay well you know the 173 gv is put to zero okay and the the uh w mass the z mass was 90 gv or so zero
Okay, well, everything is fine. So then what they said was that the Higgs field, the so-called Higgs mechanism, breaks SU2 cross U1, down to U1. So you break the electroweak down to the electromagnetic. And during this process, the Higgs field produces the masses. Magic, okay. So
Great. Now that thing is renormalizable. So this Higgs field has what's called a potential, potential V of phi. Phi is the Higgs field. And it's equal to V of phi equals lambda phi to the fourth. Phi is the fourth power of the scalar Higgs field. Assume that. If you assume that, then you can get what's called Higgs
mechanism. It's the breaking of the Higgs symmetry SU2 cross SU1, which is supposed to produce the masses. You keep drawing this because the Mexican had or is this referring to something else? That's right. So this is all done at the classical level, the Higgs mechanism, not the quantum level. It's classical.
where you have coupling of massive particles with the Higgs field you multiply them together to interact and for example the electron field multiplies the spinor electron direct field multiplies the Higgs scalar field stuff and they have a coupling constant g g sub e for electron so
Where do the masses come from? Well, it turns out that the symmetry breaking can sort of produce the W and the Z mass. You can get a prediction for the W and the Z mass, which looks reasonably good. But the fermion masses, all the quarks and leptons and so on, they have to be put in by hand.
And each mass has a coupling constant, and this is called Yukawa-Lagrangian, which is just fitted by hand. So you endeavor to calculate the masses. It's put in by hand as a free parameter. That's why the sterling world has something like 21 or 26 free parameters depending on how you count. It's lots of parameters. So
I looked at this and I thought, okay, well, let me do my finite quantum field theory, as I call it. And it works whether you have masses or not, because it has a renormalization, but it's a finite renormalization. There are no infinities. So I don't have to worry about putting the masses to zero. So I rewrote the standard model, assuming that the masses are not zero, that the symmetry is what it is.
And when you came up with this, this was before the Higgs was discovered? Yeah, when I did that, I was doing this before the Higgs. But then when the Higgs was found, I had to put this in as a particle field, which I did. And by the way, you need the Higgs field still. I don't need it for renormalization. And
and I don't need it for producing the masses okay but you do need it because without the Higgs exchange between two quarks you violate what's called unitarity at a perturbation level already at about 600 GeV this is bad so then when you put in the Higgs field
And to redo the calculation, it cancels all the unitary violations. So this means you get unity. You have to have unitarity. Probability has to be conserved. So you still need to... Okay, so I redid the whole thing and made everything finite, did all the calculations, proved that I get all the low energy experiments of the Hadron Collider. And now comes the problem.
How do I calculate the masses? No one's ever been able to do it. The Fermi masses. So I work on this occasionally, and I have a way of doing it. So Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel Prize for initiating this idea of the Higgs mechanism and putting all masses to zero for leptons, it's called the lepton model at the time.
He has recently published a paper trying to solve the problem of the masses. Steven Weinberg is very clever, by the way. Steven Weinberg is still alive? Yes, he's about my age. I think he's brilliant. But he failed to do it by his own admission. Was he using your modified quantum field theory? No, he was just doing the standard
So another criticism is that there's no experimental data that shows that this Higgs potential is lambda, which is a coupling constant, lambda times phi to the fourth. In order to do an experimental verification, you need a Higgs decaying into two other Higgs's, or three. And this is the amplitude for this.
decay product is tiniest. So there's no evidence for this potential. That's the standard tale that I've heard and that everyone has heard. Yeah, it is. The statement is that the quarks and the electrons move through this Higgs field vacuum field molasses and they're moving very slowly and the heavier particles move in the molasses slower than the faster ones. This is all okay. I mean,
It's a hypothesis, a theory, and I don't necessarily believe in it.
but we don't see its mechanism in the way that you're saying the mechanism exists. We just see the Higgs and the Higgs can be explained alternatively via your theory at least. The point is that all experiments with Higgs particles, all you ever do experimentally is look at what's called the decay products because these particles are so short-lived. They only live
10 to the power of minus 20, 10 to the minus 22, 10 to the minus 23 seconds. So you can scatter the eggs off one another, like you scatter off electrons. Electrons are stable particles and protons are stable. You can scatter them by these things. So what you do is you do experiments on the decay products. How does this heavy particle decay into the
others and so on and from that you extract the electroweak physics. So there are times I published papers where I did way back some years ago, Mexican hat but now we're violating special relative Lorentz invariance okay and so we violated so
3,1 down to SO2. And so the Mexican hat, you remember you go around the rim and you have different arrows. So I choose to break the arrow in the direction of time for cosmology. And so I start with a very low entropy.
and the entropy increases as the universe expands. That's an explanation for the error of time through violation of Lorentz invariance. But this happens fractions of seconds after the Big Bang. The violation of Lorentz invariance
In experiments today, forget it. For me, the violation occurs seconds of fragments, fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, and then through a phase transition goes directly to the speed of light that we measure today. That's important. Whereas if you violate Lorentz invariance, the way Bekenstein did with Milgram's
I went to one of his lectures at Caltech and he gave lectures on quantum field theory and I sat in the audience
And he was lecturing away and I pulled my hand up, just crashed my head. And he looked at me, yes, do you have a question? I said, I'm just crashing my head. He said, well, that's legitimate. You're allowed to do that. He had a great sense of humor. I also met Gell-Mann, of course. I knew Gell-Mann quite well, Murray Gell-Mann. It's in my, this, funny stories, anecdotes.
By the way, I wanted to check the following. That when you modify gravity today, okay, and you think you can do it without dark matter or dark energy or explain dark energy, that's another dark issue. You had to fit all the data. You can't cherry pick the data.
So Mon does okay for galaxies. It doesn't do well for clusters. This is well known. Okay. So I have to fit, Mark has to fit galaxy data. It has to fit what's called the lensing data. I just published a paper on that, another one. So it has to fit all the cosmological data. It's a huge amount of data.
So life has become very difficult for those people who think they can modify gravity, okay, as you have to fit all the data. Otherwise, someone comes along and says, you're okay, you fit the galaxies, or you fitted that. But what about the cosmology? What about the do you fit the acoustical power spectrum at this cosmic microwave background? Do you fit the matter power spectrum? That's the
spectrum for statistical analysis of pairs of galaxies and to fit the structure growth of cosmology. So all of this has to be fitted. So I had to learn all of this. You have to do all the astronomy and you have to do all the cosmology, solar system, data, everything has to be fitted. And so far MOG is
Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the
Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now are you ready to start your own success story?
Leading theories of gravity without matter, okay? And the galaxy fits so very good into what I know.
cluster fits them that are cosmology but there's something called dwarf galaxies it's very normal dwarf galaxies in our galaxy these are tiny galaxies and uh they have what's called very large mass to light ratios m over l which are huge so the idea is that the dark matter dominates them but um
The problem is that they're probably not virulized. Some of these 12 galleys are not stable. Tidal deformation destroys the stability of the virulization and so you can't use them as data. So that's how it goes.
Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence.
It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything.
If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So what are you working on these days? Well, let's see.
I've been working on my modified gravity, which I call, the acronym is MOG, which stands for modified gravity, but privately modified Moffitt gravity. Moffitt gravity. But it's not public, it's private. Right, right. Yes, and there are various issues I've been developing.
generalizations of Einstein's gravity theory already at the PhD level in Cambridge, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and over the years. But I've worked on many other subjects. Yes, so developing this theory. I also work on quantum field theory and particle physics and cosmology.
Those are my three main areas. Why don't you tell the audience a bit about your books? Yeah, so this is my latest book, The Shadow of the Black Hole. The Oxford University Press publication just came out. It's a history of the gravitational waves, their detection by LIGO observatory. And
the history of black holes. And so the book has a narrative description of LIGO detection of gravitational waves and also the observation of the first image of a black hole in the galaxy M31. And so that's
the book. I also published a memoir Einstein wrote back some years ago and this is my first book Reinventing Gravity which has a history of gravity starting from prehistoric times and through the Greeks and the history of how gravity developed
through Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. And then this is the book before my latest, Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe. It's the history of particle physics and the ramifications of quantum field theory in that
When you were mentioning the Schwarzschild radius and the equations, you said that it's dependent on the choice of coordinates, the singularity. Can you explain to the audience, because to them they might think, well, what do you mean dependent on a choice of coordinate system? First of all, what the heck is a coordinate system and why does the singularity depend on that?
Yes, well the original solution, the Schwarzschild solution, published by Schwarzschild, who was an astronomer. And by the way, he did the work in the trenches of the First World War. He was in the military, German military, in the artillery. And Einstein thought that his equation was so complex that
finding an exact solution would be near impossible. And then one year later, Swordchild, while in the trenches, came up with the solution. He actually went back to Berlin and wrote it up there, but then he developed an autoimmune disease, an immune disease, which killed him. He died not soon after publishing the paper. So, yeah, so they,
In the original mathematical solution, one uses what's called Schwarzschild coordinates. The coordinates are x, y, z, three-dimensional, and time is the fourth dimension. So that produces spacetime. And you can choose other coordinates. For example, if you do a picture of the Earth, the planet,
You can use polar coordinates or other kinds of coordinates to determine the structure of Earth. So if you use polar coordinates, you get a singularity on the North and South Pole. And similarly in the Schwarzschild solution, the horizon, the Schwarzschild radius, is singular in Schwarzschild coordinates, but you choose other coordinates.
For example, it was the mathematicians from Princeton published a paper where they did what's called analytic continuation of the Schwarzschild coordinates space to a much bigger space in which the actual membrane of the horizon was not singular. So this was a problem because
Einstein wasn't aware of this issue of coordinates. People didn't believe in the black holes because it was singular. Einstein didn't like singularities in his theory. He always tried to avoid them. This prevented them, this issue of the singular surface horizon prevented them from believing in these black holes.
But eventually that was cleared up in the early 60s. So then from that understanding of not having a singular membrane surface, a raised surface, one could begin to believe that these black holes made mathematical sense. And by the way, there's another singularity for the black hole. When a star collapses because it has a large mass, too massive
to sustain itself, it collapses because the pressure due to what's called degenerate gas, neutron gas for example, a neutron particle gas, the pressure there is not big enough to balance due to the attraction of gravity so the star collapses and it collapses in Einstein's classical theory to a singularity at the centre
the coordinate center which is radially, the distance radially is zero at the center. And this singularity has bothered physicists from the beginning and this is an issue which I can get to eventually. So these are the two possible singularities. The singular singularities at the center in Einstein's classical theory
is there. You can't avoid it by choosing another coordinate system. It's called essential singularity. Whereas as I explained for the horizon, you can choose different coordinates and not have a singular surface. So the coordinate singularities are more like figments of your coordinate choice and the essential singularity is one that is truer? That's right. It's always there in the classical theory of gravity, Einstein's theory. You started studying physics.
When I had an unusual background, I left school when I was 15 because I wanted to be an artist. What kind of artist? I paint. I still paint.
an abstract painting. So I joined, I went to Paris when I was 17, just turned 17. And I had learned about Serge Polyakov, an abstract painter, who had exhibited paintings in Copenhagen before I left for Paris. And I was very impressed with his work. So I looked him up. He lived in a wooded cell. How do you look him up? This is before the internet.
I looked him up in the sense of not the internet. I went to his house. He had a little apartment. He lived there with his wife, Madame Polyakov. He just showed up at his house. A 17-year-old kid. 17-year-old kid. And he had his little boy, Alex Polyakov. And that's where he painted this room. And he played the guitar at night because he wasn't well known at all.
Then he became famous, and I was there with him for about a year. So you showed up at his house, you stayed for a year? No, no, I had a room in Port-au-Lion, outside near the suburbs of Paris. Just one room. I had saved up some money to be in Paris, but the money was running out and I couldn't find any employment because I was British, Danish.
I was a British citizen because of my father. And so I painted. So one day he said, bring some paintings along to the studio and we're going to show you in a show at the Musée d'Art Moderne Avenue in Paris. So all of a sudden I have four paintings up, four or five.
and this big museum, modern art museum. And I was surrounded by these abstract painters, Vassarelli, Modigliani, Polyakov, who are now famous names in art. So you were there before it was cool, before it was famous. Before I was sent, I was interviewed by
journalist for Le Monde and other Figaro because I was 17, very young, to be exhibited at such a famous installation. The exhibition was called Réalité Nouvelle, actually. It was a spring exhibition every spring in Paris. So I got to know these famous artists and
I was with them for a year, and then I ran out of money. I had to go back to Copenhagen and go back living with my parents again, small apartment. And I got interested in, I started reading voraciously everything, classics.
Are you a quick reader? No. I'm slow. I'm slow at everything. Carefully. That tends to be true of mathematicians. It turns out that if you study IQ and IQ can fractionate into mathematical and verbal IQ, that verbal IQ is inversely proportional to mathematical. So the more highly gifted you are mathematically, the less you are verbally. And then the reverse tends to be true. I must say at this school, I was not a very good student.
The only subject I did well in was chemistry. For some reason, I was fascinated by chemistry. But not physics? No, physics and math. You didn't care too much about it? I didn't care about it. I didn't find it interesting. And this is around 15? No, this is around
10, 11, 12, 10. We were living in Glasgow at the time. What year is this? This would be 1942, 43. So this is during the war? During the war. Anyway, so actually when I left school in Copenhagen, I did try to get into university and I went... In those days in Copenhagen, you
went to what's called gymnasium. It's something like the old German system, educational system. And then you went into the university. So I was interviewed by this school teacher to see where I should be admitted to the gymnasium, which is the portal for university. And he asked me that I should say, by the way,
during the war in Bristol. This was 1942 in the Battle of Britain, July August 1940. There were bombings day and night and I did schooling on the ground, way underground, with sandbags. It was terrible and the teaching was very quiet, not very good. And anyway, so we went on a vacation to
western super marina seaside resort coast of england we were walking along the beach road promenade and suddenly these two misha smith bombers came up i looked i could see the pilots and the plane planes and they dropped six bombs and they fell on the beach which is why this is to that tennis court
That's not too far. Not too far. So they went into the sand, which somewhat muffled the blast, but we were blown across the street. So I suffer from PTSD. I still do actually, to some extent. Did you suffer any physical injuries? Yeah, I suffered a concussion.
So this had an effect on me. Back to the interview by the school teacher. I'm flashing back and forward. Right. He asked me these questions at the Blackboard mathematics. Because of my, what we now call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, I just froze. I couldn't, I froze. And I couldn't answer any questions. So he said,
He said, I can tell you, Moffat, that I'm actually sure you'll never become a mathematician. And he rejected me. I was rejected from going to the gymnasium. That was the end of the possibility of attending university in Denmark. So anyway, back to Paris, Copenhagen again. I got interested in
And I did a lot of reading. So I read Arthur Eddington's books, popular books. I got very interested in that, in the physics and astronomy. And I started getting excited about that. So I decided this was something to pursue. So I started learning math and physics. So it turned out that I could attend the library, the university library, the University of Copenhagen library.
and get books on physics and maths, which is unusual for cities. You can't do that in the University of Toronto. The Royal Basin Library, you have to be a member of the university. But back then, any member of the public could take out the university. The public could go in. So I took out these books on maths and physics. So then it just suddenly clicked.
Within about a week or two, I learned calculus, trigonometry. Within... So you found that you had a natural aptitude for that? I had a natural aptitude for that. Or did you find some trick that helped you absorb that? I have to tell you, I never understood how I did this. To this day, you don't understand? I still don't understand it. And within
A couple of months I was moving fast, okay. I was going through all our mathematics and physics. You must have had some great books too. Yeah, I had somehow understood as I moved forward what to look for, what books to look for. And so within six months I got up to general relativity and
Then I did general relativity within a month. Okay, for people listening, you went from a teacher saying that you're never going to learn mathematics, to you also not knowing much of mathematics at that time, to then you picking up your first book in the library for whatever reason you were curious about it, to then learning general relativity in the span of six months when you were around 15 or so. No, 1920. After that I had no interest in
When you say Einstein's unified field theory,
You're not referring to general relativity? No, this is what he called the non-symmetric theory of gravitation. He called it generalization of gravitation theory. He didn't call it unified field theory, generalization of gravity. Ah, okay, because this was around the time when Einstein was publishing. People, like for example me, we don't know much about what Einstein published that didn't work. We're only taught what worked, which is GR and the special relativity first.
I actually don't know about the specifics of his Unified Field Theory attempts. A lot of this is described in my book Reinventing Gravity. I go through the whole history of this. After 1915-16 publication of general relativity, Einstein kept publishing applications like Detection of Gravitational Waves,
his famous book on cosmology and so on, his famous article on cosmology, but he was more interested in unifying electromagnetism with gravity and making the one geometrical theory, okay, and then he started this in about 1918, 1919,
Isn't general relativity already compatible with electromagnetism? It was, because you can incorporate Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism into general relativity in what's called a covariant way, a way of not being dependent on any particular coordinate system. It's called the Einstein-Maxwell theory. And it is, but Maxwell's equations are not unified with gravity, so to speak, in a geometrical structure.
So he worked on and off on these unified theories, his generalization of gravitation theory, his theory. In 1925, for example, he followed collusion and worked on higher dimensional gravity to include the electromagnetic field of Maxwell's equations. And he wasn't happy with that.
And then he, Weill, Herman Weill, the famous German mathematician who published a book, famous book on Einstein's theory of gravity called Matter and Space-Time and Matter. He developed a unified theory called the Weill Unified Field Theory.
And this was actually the beginnings of what's called gauge theory in quantum field theory, quantum physics. But that failed because Einstein criticized it. There was a problem with understanding how clocks work in the theory because of this so-called gauge theory. But then in 1925 Einstein
generalized his general relativity theory by saying the following. General relativity is based on a spacetime metric, which is a symmetric metric, it's a symmetric tensor, okay? g mu nu, it's called, where mu nu run over spacetime coordinates one to four.
So he said well why should this metric, this tensor be symmetric? It can be non-symmetric. You have a symmetric plus an anti-symmetric part added together. Just let me explain this a bit to the audience. So there's a metric which is a two tensor and a tensor is what you can think of as taking two vectors, you know what a vector is, and then outputting
what your underlying field is which in most of the cases it's the real numbers so that is you eat two vectors give me two vectors and I'll give you a real number and you have to satisfy some conditions like linearity and so on you can also switch those two vectors so you can say give me a vector a give me one vector and then give me another one or give me that one and then give me the other one so give me a and b or give me b and a and then if the result is the same in your calculation then you call it symmetric okay that's right
So yes, so anyway he developed the mathematics for this and published it as a paper in 1925. There was a lot of excitement about any publication that he produced because 1925 was famous but the Binding of Light verified general relativity in 1919. Arthur Heddington's expedition
to Africa and solar eclipse and so on and so the anyway so back to the non-symmetric theory. Then he left it and tried other made other attempts to have a unified theory. He felt they failed. So 1945 in collaboration with
Strauss. He was Einstein's assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he now is, okay, 1945 professor there in the Institute. He went back to the non-symmetric theory and worked with Strauss, but there was a problem because the field equations of the theory
attractive, beautiful looking. It's quite natural to generalize Einstein's theory. There's no reason why this tensor should be symmetric. And so what's called the connection to which is associated with the metric tensor at the affine connection is also non-symmetric in this theory.
has a symmetric part which is the affine connection which is not a tensor and the skew anti-symmetric part the skew part which is is a tensor anyway so uh it turned out that the field equations which are supposed to describe Maxwell's equations were not Maxwell's equations
And he couldn't get the equation of motion for a charged particle. It was called the Lorentz force law. Hendrik Lorentz, a tax physicist, developed this at the turn of the 20th century. The Lorentz force on the charged particle didn't come out of the theory. It was very bad, serious.
So people criticized this in publications and so I looked at his theory and I found another problem with it. So he did at that time he had what's called an emission metric tensor so he had the symmetric power was real and the anti-symmetric power was in the measuring quantity measuring square root of minus one times the measuring part
and I found a problem with the Lagrangian, what's called the action principle from which you get the filthy questions. So I wrote him a letter and I wrote two papers actually. That is to say you found a problem with the Lagrangian or the action? Yeah, the structure of the action as to whether it was real or not. The Lagrangian has to be real, okay, otherwise you get into trouble with
The development of the theory is not self-consistent. So I wrote these two papers. I typed on an old typewriter. With the math symbols on the old typewriter too? No, I had to put them in by a pen. It's all very primitive compared to what we do today. And I sent him these manuscripts and a letter. I never expected to hear from him, because I mean,
famous Einstein. People were writing to him all the time. It'd be like writing Obama and then Obama replying to it. Exactly. However, my criticism was correct. 20 or 22? I was 20. I looked at the manuscripts and
Hmm, okay. So you corrected Einstein. Yeah, so I'm not correct. I'm, I question what he was doing. And so he, it's amazing, and a letter comes in from, from Princeton, from Mercer Street, where he had his house, and discussing my paper, papers, and, and
discussing this issue I raised and so on. So we got into a correspondence and this went on for some months and I also criticized the fact that he was only unifying gravity with electromagnetism and that we knew about the nuclear force. I mean it was already nuclear, what we call nuclear physics. So how can you leave that out? Okay and he responded to that.
So then we had a friend, my father had a friend who was a chemist and living he called me an American and he got to hear about me and then he somehow got Niels Bohr at the born attitude
got to hear about me and so I was invited to the Bohr Institute and I was interviewed by Niels Bohr for two hours. He criticized Einstein because people felt Einstein was wasting his time. Bohr criticized Einstein? Yeah and said that Albert was wasting his time and he said Albert's like an alchemist
tried to turn lead into gold and so on and so on. I just sat there, famous Nobel Prize winner thinks that another famous Nobel Prize winner is wasting his time, okay. I didn't think Einstein was wasting his time, but he was doing unified theory before it ever became popular at all, okay. And he was actually ignored at institute
by physicists. All of his work was just wasting time. So I was a British citizen, you see, because I never became a Danish citizen because I was born in Copenhagen, but I took my father's citizenship. So I got in touch with the consulate, the British Consulate in Copenhagen,
I got in touch with the Department of Scientific Industrial Research in London and they invited me to London. So I went there and they arranged for me to be interviewed by professors to see whether I was the real article or some
figment of somebody's imagination, including my own. And I was interviewed by William McCray, a professor in London University, and then I was sent to William Bono, a professor at Liverpool University, who was working on the Einstein's Unifiable
Einstein's theory for the fact that you could get the equation of motion for a charged particle from the theory and also that Maxwell's equations didn't look like Maxwell's equations as they should do. So then I was sent to Dublin to do an advanced study in Dublin
And Robin Schrodinger, the famous Robin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger equation was director of the institute. So I went there and I went up and he was interviewed by Schrodinger. He sat on his bed with a little cap on his head and a small bedroom. And he had my papers, which I had sent Einstein.
No, I had copies and I had just given them to Bohr and the department that I was invited to in London and so on people and they sent it to Schrodinger.
So then he got angry and said, why are you using Albert's methods to do this theory? Because Schrodinger was working on the non-symmetric theory. He published several papers. I was in the, in the, um, uh, pursuing the Royal Irish Academy, uh, which published papers on Greek philosophy and all sorts of issues. And, um,
There was a dispute between Einstein and Schrodinger, it turned out, because Schrodinger was interviewed by newspapers because of his publication of Unified Field Theory and claimed that he had solved the problem, but was not happy about this because he had solved the problem. So they had this dispute.
and Paoli had to intervene because they got it got rather poor Albert threatened to sue Schweringer anyway so Paoli damped things out Wolfgang Paoli famous physicist Nobel Prize winner and anyway so this was the atmosphere I was interviewed
And so, Schrodinger had his way of deriving the non-symmetric theory, and Einstein had his way doing it. And Schrodinger was angry because I wasn't using it as a way. Why are you not using my way? I said, I will do that in the future. And I had to be diplomatic. Anyway, so back to London.
So the next thing is that Schrodinger sent a letter to the people in London, this department of scientific research in London. And the letter of recommendation must have been something, because the next thing is I'm sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, to be interviewed by Dennis Sharma, who was a student of Paul Dirac.
and he was a Darden Fellow of Trinity College and he was also a lecturer at the time at Cambridge University and so I was interviewed by Shama in his rooms at Trinity and after about 20 minutes he said come with me so we walk across the Trinity Great Court lawns
Only a dawn can walk on the lawns, but I was with him. I can't see him. And the other way he had to walk on the gravel path. And taking to the brochure's office, the Trinity, and Dennis said, this gentleman, John Moffitt, has to be matriculated as a PhD student. And this is without an undergraduate degree nor a master's. So they looked into this person. He said, but he doesn't have any degree.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No. Okay. So I'm articulating him. And yes. Okay. All right. So that so I was given a supervisor, professor, supervisor, Fred Hoyle. And I went to see him at St. John's College. These rooms. He said, Well, you don't have an undergraduate degree.
No. Well, maybe you should think about taking the tripods exams. These are the famous exams and the crisis exams at Cambridge. There's something called the mathematics tripods, first part and second part and so on. And, well, I was rather precocious and somewhat arrogant, I should say, as a young man. I felt that
So I said, well, Professor Hoyle is just going to waste my time because I know all this, okay? So he looked at me dubiously. He went through the tripods himself. In his biography, Hoyle's biography, he had problems with that getting through. And he was brilliant, of course, but there were very hard exams.
And so he's probably thought, well, if I had to do this, why is this person 20, 21 year old, you know, so I can understand his attitude. So I decided that something should be done about this. So I wrote three papers within two or three months. And
submitted to the proceedings of Cambridge Philosophical Society and the first paper was very mathematical, it was a generalization of Romanian geometry and the other two were my first modified gravity theory and long papers. The paper on the, I was trying to unify gravity and electromagnetism
in my own way, okay, so I invented this now, not Schrodinger, no, this is a different way of doing it, and they accepted them, three papers, so I mean the Cambridge proceedings has an ancient history, I mean famous mathematicians and physicists have published their, Schrodinger published papers there, the quantum mechanics, so I went back to
Fred Hoyle and I gave him the papers when he sat and looked at them and he said well forget about the tripod exam just continue with what you're doing. That was it. So I did my own research. I went had to go to California to do his steady state theory and
work with Fowler, working Fowler at the Caltech in Pasadena and visit other institutions. So I had to get another supervisor. So I got up to Salam, who was at that time a lecturer at St. John's College, where Dirac was, and I just did my own thing. I attended two courses. I never took any exams.
How was Dirac as a teacher, as a lecturer? Very good, very clear, excellent. Did he speak much? He has a reputation. He started off with a loud voice and to make sure that
he was being heard and then even especially in the back of the classroom a lot of the students attended, all the graduate students, research students attended in physics because they were famous. It's based on his book on quantum mechanics and then his voice would be some more muted because he realized that people were beginning to, that the people were able to understand his speech
Anyway, so I continued my work on general relativity. I worked on the equations of motion in general relativity. It's what's called the Einstein-Nuffel-Hoffmann method. And I worked on my unified theory. This was going to be my thesis. And then I switched to particle physics because I was already well ahead with
my gravity work but I started becoming interested in particle physics and quantum field theory so I started doing quantum field theory and by the way in the first year as a student there were about six or seven of us in the maths department what's called Bennett Street, Cambridge and
We had a room where we could meet, a big room. And so after a year, we were told to give a lecture. We had seminars every Thursday. And I had to give a seminar on my work, which was on quantum field theory, not gravity. And I worked on the axiomatics of quantum field theory and what's called Haag's theorem.
developed by a German physicist called Hag, Rudolf Hag. Pally worked on this Hag theorem at the time, Wolfgang Pall. So I gave this lecture and it was fairly original work and I used a notation of Fried Fried
Friedman, an American quantum field theorist at New York University published a book. So Dirac said to me, asked a question. He says, what are those round brackets? I said, this is what you call bras and kets, the triangular brackets. And he said, well, that's very interesting. He was fascinated by this.
Who invented this? Professor Friedman. Anyway, so three of them were failed. It was pretty brutal. There was no exam. We were just to give an lecture on original physics research. And if you didn't make it, you were out. He was sent down from Cambridge. And so I was one of the first to survive.
PhD in 1958. During the course of my work, I met Roy Kerr, the Kerr metric. He came in from New Zealand to be at Trinity College, where we became friends. And so he said, what should I do? I said, well, I said, what about physics? He was a brilliant mathematician. I said, well, do gravity, general relativity.
You don't have to worry too much about the physics at the moment, because generality was not that well developed at this point. We're talking about 1956-57. So even after Einstein died, general relativity wasn't completely developed? No. So the general relativity that we learn in university is the fully articulated form that Einstein didn't even put? Yeah, it was being developed, still being developed and so on at the time.
mathematically speaking. There was not enough experimental data, you see. It was not that cosmology was an infancy. During my work I read a paper by Einstein and Infel published in 1949 and Infel was a Polish physicist more so and I found a mistake. It was wrong, I think.
So I got hold of Roy and I said, have a look at this. I did the calculations and he looked at it and he said, yeah, you're right, it's wrong. So we wrote a paper together. We thought we should do something about this. And because there was a famous paper, there was a famous photograph of Einstein at the front of the front of the paper.
This was, it was the Canadian Journal of Mathematics that published the paper. And this photograph was by Kash, famous photographer called Kash. And anyway, so we wrote up this paper and sent it to Physical Review. It was reviewed by Peter Bergman, who was one of Einstein's assistants at one point.
He was one of the editors of Physical Review and he wrote back saying, we can't publish this paper because it besmarks the reputation of famous physicists of Einstein. So I got upset about it and I was angry about that. I was at the verge of leaving physics, I can't deal with this.
So because you have responsibility for posterity, younger physicists who can use this work. So I got my PhD. They were not happy about it. I put this, I started working on it to collect it, okay, and wrote a paper and I put it into my PhD thesis.
And my examiners were not entirely happy about this. But there wasn't anything they could do about it. So I then eventually I got my PhD without an undergraduate degree. By the way, I was, I think the one at that time, maybe still the only student at Trinity to get a PhD without an undergraduate degree.
I think in theoretical physics anyway that I know of. Maybe that's still true, I don't know. But um, so it's fairly unique. The exiles weren't happy about that either, of course, because they had this guinea pig, okay, so to speak, who was going through the system in Cambridge. Is it possible to do this? Okay, well, I did it.
So then I got a fellowship from the same department in Dutch, Scientific and Dutch Research, who originally got me to England, to a two-year fellowship. So I went to Imperial College. In the meantime, Abdus Salam was my professor at Imperial College London. And here I was, I was put in an office next to his office. I was his first post-doctoral fellow.
and started working in particle physics and field theory. But I was worrying about getting a job. At this point I was married and so I got hold of John Wheeler and he suggested I apply for a job at the Institute for Research in Baltimore, Maryland.
which I did. They offered me a job so I went there in 1959 and was at this institute. I was a senior researcher there. I was doing particle physics and field theory. They also had a math department and Solomon Lifshitz was the director of the famous Maths Institute there and
Then quickly I published papers in particle physics, published a lot of papers rapidly at physics, particle physics. Then I was offered a job at the University of Toronto as an associate professor already.
with the promise of being a full professor within a couple of years, which again is very unusual. And I got a job there. I had to do teaching, full-time teaching. So I started teaching undergraduate courses and I never attended undergraduate courses. But I did okay. And graduate courses and so on.
That's it. Do you know who Ryan Keating is? He's an experimental physicist. Yeah, I read his book, How to Lose the Nobel Prize. Quite an amusing, entertaining book.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 12596,
"audio_duration_seconds": 7810.95,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T02:51:06Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"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."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"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."
},
{
"end_time": 81.374,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.203,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants."
},
{
"end_time": 106.63,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 83.234,
"text": " All right. Hello, Toll listeners. Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
},
{
"end_time": 133.353,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 107.329,
"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
},
{
"end_time": 163.234,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 133.353,
"text": " But in my opinion, they're not going to detect the dark matter."
},
{
"end_time": 192.619,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 163.78,
"text": " I'm here with Professor John Moffat. Part of what I'm doing with this channel, as well as this documentary, is to place people who I think have gotten not as much press as they should. You've heard of Lee Smolin. You've heard of Eric Weinstein, especially from the intellectual dark web. You've heard of Sabine Hassenfelder because of her YouTube channel. But not many people have heard"
},
{
"end_time": 222.79,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 192.944,
"text": " at least in the public have heard of John Moffat and he deserves just as much credit. He's put out quite a few theories and not many people put out even one theory. They usually develop an existing theory. So I'm super excited to meet with John in person. John, how are you doing? Very good. Thank you. Let's hear about your modified theory of gravity. So this non-symmetric theory, which I worked on,"
},
{
"end_time": 252.619,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 223.78,
"text": " I decided that the anti-symmetric part of this metric tensor was not the electromagnetic field. It was additional degrees of freedom for gravity. It was part of the gravitational field, okay? And so I called it the non-symmetric gravitational theory. Now comes the first acronym, NGT."
},
{
"end_time": 282.261,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 252.79,
"text": " Let me just break this down for the audience quickly. So in general, relativity of the two tensor, as I was saying before, then you have the symmetric. It's a symmetric tensor, but any tensor can be broken up into a symmetric and an anti-symmetric part. You can decompose it much like you can with coordinates. There's an x and y. Or if you know about principal bundles, there's a horizontal vertical part. So you can decompose. So you can decompose a tensor into a symmetric and anti-symmetric part. Anti-symmetric part is just zero in the Einstein field equations, typically."
},
{
"end_time": 311.869,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 283.387,
"text": " And what Moffat is working on or was working on was realizing that this anti-symmetric part, which Einstein also tried to work on, doesn't represent electromagnetism, which is why Einstein threw it out because he was trying to make it fit. You're like, wait, maybe it's not electromagnetism, but it's something else. OK. And you can correct me if I'm incorrect. Very good. Perfect. That's a succinct description."
},
{
"end_time": 339.65,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 312.892,
"text": " So I published a paper in physical review, 1979, called A New Theory of Gravitation. What you do in theoretical physics is the following. You have an idea. As Richard Feynman said, you guess an idea. Now I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law."
},
{
"end_time": 369.667,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 340.776,
"text": " In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we comp- Well, don't laugh. That's really true. And, okay, you have this idea. It takes seconds to have the idea, okay? But then you have to formulate it in terms of a mathematical system, mathematical equations. Okay? So you do that. And it has to be self-consistent. And then you have to"
},
{
"end_time": 400.572,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 371.288,
"text": " And the latter part, the third phase, is very important because you have to know whether it's correct or not experimentally. It's physics. You're doing physics, not just mathematics. And if it doesn't fit the data, then you throw away that guess, that idea."
},
{
"end_time": 429.957,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 401.22,
"text": " and you start some other idea or you quit. And this is how physics is done. So I had tried to find some way of verifying this non-symmetric gravity theory. It's not easy. Doing experimental gravity physics is difficult. Of course, I had to agree with Einstein's theory of gravity. That's the first"
},
{
"end_time": 450.913,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 431.732,
"text": " necessary thing to find is correct. If it doesn't agree with presently soil experimental data, for example, then the whole thing is off. Also, there were some"
},
{
"end_time": 480.009,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 451.715,
"text": " People criticize it too, just you have to have criticism. Physics is a very conservative business. You do not change the paradigm in physics unless you absolutely have to. And it's the paradigm shift is usually driven by experimental physics. Some, the present theory, so-called standard theory. By the way, I don't like that I went standard, but anyway, standard theory doesn't agree with some data."
},
{
"end_time": 509.582,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 481.118,
"text": " or a theory comes forward that makes a prediction and your theory fits the data, that prediction fits, but the older theory doesn't. This is how physics progresses. And so also at this point, this was 1979, so I worked on this in the 1980s. I had students working on"
},
{
"end_time": 538.712,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 511.34,
"text": " and for example I had Neil Cornish graduate student who was from Australia and he's now professor at the University of Montana. He's a senior professor there, head of a gravitational physics group and"
},
{
"end_time": 570.009,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 541.544,
"text": " So we worked on this and I had a potential solution for a black hole which did not have a horizon. Using your modified theory? Using this modified theory. A black hole with no horizon? That's right. Konish applied for a position at Cambridge University to be Stephen Hawking's assistant and he became his assistant"
},
{
"end_time": 595.145,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 570.725,
"text": " It's quite a funny story because as Neil told me later, he was sitting in one of the rooms of the Department of Applied Mathematics, the Silver Street, Cambridge, where Hawking was, and he's looking at the blackboard, at a blackboard, and he suddenly hears this voice, computer voice,"
},
{
"end_time": 625.265,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 596.101,
"text": " Ah, so you're Neil Cornish. So you don't believe in black holes, I believe. That was his first thing. So anyway, so this is the 80s. So I started, then I started doing particle physics again and left it for a while. I worked on unified theory again with another graduate student, David Ball."
},
{
"end_time": 653.234,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 626.152,
"text": " who ended up as a professor at the University of British Columbia. He was chair, actually, of the department at one point. David Bowen, BOL, and also with Gabor Kunstatter, who became professor and dean of science at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. We worked on this stuff, but there was no clear experimental evidence that could prove it."
},
{
"end_time": 682.824,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 653.814,
"text": " You have to have one piece of some prediction, something that you have in your theory that cannot be fitted by the other theories. This is very difficult. This doesn't happen often in physics. Maxwell's prediction that light has to move as an electromagnetic wave with the speed of light is a prediction which hurts."
},
{
"end_time": 711.852,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 683.473,
"text": " physicists proved experimentally to be correct. This is a remarkable result. Dirac, Dirac equation, one of the fundamental equations of quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum physics, predicted antimatter. They went and looked for antimatter, and then some Caltech found in 1932. This is an amazing prediction, see?"
},
{
"end_time": 738.933,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 712.329,
"text": " This happens a few times in physics. Einstein's theory of general relativity had to pass the solar system experiments. And the bending of light, of course, 1.575 arc seconds, the bending of light by the sun. The first eclipse experiments were not all that great, actually."
},
{
"end_time": 768.268,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 739.326,
"text": " and time had to go on before we had a really confirmation of the bending of light prediction by Einstein. And the Perigee advance of Mercury, this is the Rosetta precession of Mercury's orbit. Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun and it precesses in a reticence or set shape, which confounded Newtonian gravity"
},
{
"end_time": 797.944,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 768.899,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 828.814,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 798.814,
"text": " Where does your modified theory come in?"
},
{
"end_time": 859.326,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 829.411,
"text": " If you observe Doppler shifts, light coming and going, blue shift and red shift, and from these observations you can determine how fast stars are moving around in the galaxy, in any galaxy, and they found with great surprise that the stars were moving faster than could be accounted for by Newtonian gravity. If you plot the rotation curve"
},
{
"end_time": 883.524,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 860.606,
"text": " of the speed, velocity, vertical axis versus the distance of the sides of the star from the centre are equal to zero radially, then the curve comes up and flattens out, whereas your towing gravity predicts that it should fall off, okay, and there's quite a six times"
},
{
"end_time": 913.302,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 884.531,
"text": " The difference between Newtonian gravity and this flat rotation curve experimentally, observationally, is a factor of six. And that's confined to a galaxy. That's what happens in our galaxy. Well, the reason I'm saying that is because we're gravitationally pulled by some other galaxy. So if that curve extended out extremely far, then we should be spinning. You get back to Newtonian gravity. You must go as you go out towards infinity."
},
{
"end_time": 942.329,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 914.701,
"text": " So it flattens out and then comes back down again. So this intrigued me because Einstein gravity contains Newtonian gravity and we effectively use Newtonian gravity for galaxies because the gravitational field is weak. All experiments on gravity are for weak gravitational fields. The solar system is weak gravity"
},
{
"end_time": 972.244,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 943.046,
"text": " except for neutron stars. Einstein knew that it doesn't work. Dark matter. What is this? In the 70s, the first astronomer to note this problem was Zwicky in 1933, a Swiss astronomer, rather a century character. He has his name on virtually every aspect of physics."
},
{
"end_time": 1000.828,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 972.551,
"text": " did some calculation for what are called clusters. These are clusters of galaxies, not stars. Galaxies containing stars. And these clusters are huge. And he found that by what's called the Virial Theorem that if you use Newtonian gravity, they can't be stable. They have to blow apart. Gravity is not sufficiently strong to maintain"
},
{
"end_time": 1030.435,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 1001.152,
"text": " equilibrium, stability. So he said, well, there's got to be extra dark matter. And that's it already 1933 and so on. But no one paid much attention to it. But because of Vera Rubin and the problem with the galaxies, now things became serious. And more and more attention was paid to this dark matter. And now it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1060.196,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 1030.759,
"text": " to me, in my opinion, one of the major problems of modern physics, because due to the standard cosmology, which I will get into the standard cosmological model, dark matter plays an essential role. 85, 86% of all matter is dark matter, according to fitting the data, cosmological data. So"
},
{
"end_time": 1089.735,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1061.561,
"text": " After decades of effort and large sums of money, millions, billions of dollars, one experiment after another, they've been looking for dark matter particles and no one can detect them, no one has detected them. So what does this mean? I call it potentially the modern ether,"
},
{
"end_time": 1118.865,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1090.538,
"text": " because ether was accepted as being a fact at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century it was a fact because you had to have electromagnetic waves move through some medium like sound moves through air as a medium. Maxwell believed in the ether. So what does your modified theory of gravity say about dark matter?"
},
{
"end_time": 1143.763,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1119.718,
"text": " decided to say that the anti-symmetric part of my gravity theory was the part of gravity that modifies gravity without dark matter, you see, because the first modification of gravity, a serious modification,"
},
{
"end_time": 1170.179,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1144.684,
"text": " was Isaac Newton. It was Albert Einstein who modified Isaac Newton's gravitational theory published in 1687 in the Procipia. And so I'm modifying Einstein. Einstein is failing. Newtonian and Einstein are failing. They cannot describe this"
},
{
"end_time": 1195.64,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1171.271,
"text": " issue without inventing invisible matter. But one is always agnostic in physics. If you can find the dark matter next month, these huge experiments that are still ongoing, trying to detect what's called WIMPs, weakly interacting matter particles,"
},
{
"end_time": 1220.435,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1196.852,
"text": " If they find that it fits in and they can explain the rotation curves of the galaxies, then forget about modified gravity. Einstein's theory of gravity is a beautiful theory. It fits the data and that's it. But in my opinion, they're not going to detect the dark matter because it doesn't exist. That's my personal opinion."
},
{
"end_time": 1252.79,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1223.029,
"text": " So I published papers doing this, identifying this anti-symmetric part with them as a new degree of freedom and gravity so that I could fit the galaxy rotation curves, the flattening of the curves, without dark matter. And I did, okay. And I published a paper in 1995, physical letters B doing this."
},
{
"end_time": 1282.363,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1253.353,
"text": " But astronomers complained because non-symmetric gravity theory is complicated, and astronomers don't like this complication. So I said, all right, I'll produce a simpler version. So I produced what's called MSTG, Metric Skew Symmetric Gravity. Is it taking the previous version and making it a simpler theory?"
},
{
"end_time": 1313.2,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1283.609,
"text": " When you say it's simpler, what are you sacrificing for the simplicity? I'm sacrificing a lot of the mathematical mathematics. I made it into a simpler version by means of throwing out a lot of the complicated nonlinear mathematics. Okay, so the way that I'm imagining it is like a Taylor expansion. You just take the linear part and just remove the higher part. Exactly right."
},
{
"end_time": 1341.032,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1314.036,
"text": " So then I've published papers with this on dark matter. I simplified it again because the astronomer was still complaining it. So I said, OK, I'll make it simpler. So now we're down to scalar tensor vector gravity, STVG. And this consists of taking Einstein's theory. You've got to have Einstein's theory as a base. Otherwise, it's not going to work."
},
{
"end_time": 1369.292,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1341.954,
"text": " When you say you have it as a base, you mean you derive it in a limit like Newtonian's driving? That's correct, exactly. You have to do that. Einstein was confounded by the fact that he couldn't get Newtonian gravity over a period of a year or two. He gave up at one point, but then he went back in with Grossman and eventually they got around to getting what's called the Poisson equation and Newtonian gravity as a limit."
},
{
"end_time": 1397.978,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1369.804,
"text": " natural limit of Einstein gravity. So I had to have this. So it's okay. So now I have a theory where I need a stronger gravity. So I made big G, I call it big G, Newton's constant. I made it a variable constant. Interesting. And following what Paul Dirac did in 1938, Proceedings of Royal Society,"
},
{
"end_time": 1425.981,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1398.217,
"text": " You also have a variable speed of light? Is that tied to the variable g? That's another theory. So, by the way, the photon of gravity, the quantum, the photons in quotes, is the graviton. The graviton is the quantum particle that is exchanged between"
},
{
"end_time": 1455.06,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1427.09,
"text": " particles, matter particles, and produces Newtonian gravity or Einstein gravity. Electrodynamics, Maxwell's electrodynamics is a relativistic version of Maxwell's theory. The photon is exchanged between electrons to produce the Coulomb force. So the graviton is the photon. No one's ever detected a graviton and probably no one ever will because gravity is so weak"
},
{
"end_time": 1482.858,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1456.971,
"text": " He would take the whole galaxy as an accelerator to detect a graviton. As Freeman Dyson said, if you have a big enough mass to detect a graviton, that mass would collapse to a black hole. Anyway, that's the theory, okay, the graviton. So here I have the metric tensor field of Einstein"
},
{
"end_time": 1513.319,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1483.882,
"text": " And I have a new degree of freedom, the vector field. And the vector field corresponds to a spin-1 graviton, or a symmetric tensor, g-menu, corresponds to a spin-2 graviton. So I complete gravity theory with an extra graviton, spin-1 graviton. And this vector field is sourced by matter, by mass. So the electromagnetic potential"
},
{
"end_time": 1543.814,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1513.916,
"text": " A mu of Maxwell's equations is sourced by electric charge. My vector field is sourced by mass, just like Einstein's metric field theory is field is sourced by mass, by density of matter. So that's affected to the theory. And I wrote it up and published it in 2006. And eventually,"
},
{
"end_time": 1573.046,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1544.718,
"text": " I started calling it MOG, Modified Gravity, because more than Mordecai Milgram in Israel, he was the first to publish a modification of Newtonian gravity, called MON, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, in 1983. And he's a pioneer to do this, because"
},
{
"end_time": 1600.64,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1573.695,
"text": " People were critical, I mean, you know, modifying Einstein gravity. So, this is MOND. But MOND is a non-relativistic formula. It's not relativistic. It's just a modification. It's a modification of Newtonian gravity, and it's based on assuming that there's a special acceleration, a sub zero, a for acceleration."
},
{
"end_time": 1630.52,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1601.51,
"text": " Even if MOND had correct predictions, it would still be incomplete because how does it comport with the general relativity would be the open question? Because people attempted to"
},
{
"end_time": 1655.179,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1631.459,
"text": " generalized this non-relativistic phenomenological formula, a simple formula. By the way, astronomers like this simple formula. Astronomers like the simple math. So, it's a high school level formula, okay. So, it's not a sense, my sense of humor is"
},
{
"end_time": 1683.831,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1656.323,
"text": " I call it MOG, instead of MOND. But this is silly. It's important to call it MOG because it's modifying gravity as opposed to modifying Newtonian dynamics. So you've got to have general relativity"
},
{
"end_time": 1713.353,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1684.565,
"text": " Okay, so the big question everyone wants to know, and the experimentalists are watching this, is do you make predictions that agree with the data? Okay, so back to the three phases of physics. Have an idea, guess it. Mathematical formulation, STVG, publish it. Now comes what I call, I call it physics imagination in a straight jacket. Imagination, the idea,"
},
{
"end_time": 1741.8,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1713.643,
"text": " The straight jacket is experimental physics. Can you agree with experimental physics? Can you predict something that the other people can't fit? It's hard. That's why physics is so hard. Because when I paint, I still paint. There's no criteria you have to match. No, I don't think it's all left"
},
{
"end_time": 1770.23,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1742.227,
"text": " It's all right brain, more or less, your feelings, color, composition. So I finish, put it up on the wall, and you either like it or you don't like it. I don't have to prove anything. I don't have to prove the painting. It's not from logic, I don't have to prove it. Just if you don't like it, well, okay. Maybe you don't like this painting. But in physics, the test is the experiment."
},
{
"end_time": 1800.503,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1771.084,
"text": " And this is what makes physics so hard. It's very challenging. That's why I like it, OK? So OK, moving forward, one paper after another. I've been publishing papers now for 14 years. STVG was published in 2006. So then in 2015, I published a pair of long paper"
},
{
"end_time": 1827.022,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1800.947,
"text": " mog black holes, because I found a black hole solution. And I call them mog black holes. I call them Schwarzschild mog black holes or Kerr mog black holes. Kerr, my former collaborator and friend from Trinity. And there's been a lot of, I've lost track how many papers are published"
},
{
"end_time": 1853.814,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1827.295,
"text": " Okay, great, because one of my questions was what's the reception like from the physics community? There must be, I don't know, I'm guessing 50, 60 papers. That's a lot of citations, hundreds of citations in fact. I'm up to something like 6,000, 7,000 citations. Holy moly. Yeah. There's something called Research Gate."
},
{
"end_time": 1881.118,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1854.753,
"text": " which is a portal. Congrats on that. So I'm up to something like 11,000 readerships. Holy moly. Yeah. So a lot of people know me from my physics, but this paper I just sent you, just from Chinese, from China. That just got published yesterday. It's on the archive. It'll be published eventually. It's a very"
},
{
"end_time": 1910.845,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1881.357,
"text": " Very good paper, because I published it in my big paper on Mark Blackhall's, published the European physical journal See, and this is a major European journal in 2016 and subsequent papers. I published a solution of my modified gravity theory for an object"
},
{
"end_time": 1939.531,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1911.476,
"text": " which may not have horizons and is regular. It does not have any singularity at the center. It's completely regular. Interesting. But it's close to having a horizon because there's a critical, in the development, there's a free parameter called alpha in the mathematics of the metric describing my black hole."
},
{
"end_time": 1969.735,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1941.049,
"text": " And this alpha is a deviation parameter. It deviates the theory from Einstein black holes, the size of alpha. When alpha is zero, you get Einstein black holes. When alpha is non-zero, you don't, OK? So in addition to the black hole with a horizon, actually, my solution always has two horizons."
},
{
"end_time": 2000.026,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1970.879,
"text": " The parameters are just mass and spin, and alpha, three parameters, that's it. So, I published a... No charge, mass, spin and alpha, no charge. No electric charge. By the way, blind holes, astrophysical bodies do not have electric charge. They're electrically neutral, because"
},
{
"end_time": 2030.111,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 2000.555,
"text": " You have positive charge electrons, and you have positive and negative charge, clumps of charge, right? And they neutralize one another. I mean, this is electrically neutral. All astrophysical bodies are electrically neutral. The Sun is electrically neutral. There may be a tiny amount of charge, but it's negligible. So it has very little, if any, effect on space-time metric."
},
{
"end_time": 2060.64,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 2031.288,
"text": " through Maxwell-Einstein equations. This is for astrophysics. So black holes should be electrically neutral. Papers are published showing this is the case. They neutralize. So they discharge their charge. So this theory is just mass. But mass is positive. It doesn't have a negative counterpart. There's no negative mass."
},
{
"end_time": 2091.049,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 2061.203,
"text": " By the way, if someone is interested and they have a penchant for mathematics as well as physics and they want to learn about your theory, do they just read the papers or do you have a book that you published, much like there are books that introduce someone to general relativity from nothing? No, I haven't actually published"
},
{
"end_time": 2119.309,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2091.647,
"text": " a textbook on this. I'm too busy working out the theory. I do these, but I just dictate them. But doing a textbook is much more complicated because you have to deal with all the equations and this. But eventually I hope to get a review. But there was a review published by Daniela Perez and"
},
{
"end_time": 2147.944,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2120.162,
"text": " Gustav Romero, they're at the Institute for Physics in Argentina and they published a whole large big review of my MOG in a book. What do you think of current theories of everything? Are they missing some key ingredient? Are they missing that they're trying to unify GR as it is and they're not unifying MOG? Or is there something else that you feel like they're lacking?"
},
{
"end_time": 2177.159,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2148.985,
"text": " Okay, well, there's a long history to this. We just talked about Unified Theory, way back, Harmon Weill and Albert Einstein, 1918. But yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. There's loop, there's m-theory. I'm happy with this, this toe, the acronym toe, because what does it mean to have a theory of everything? I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 2205.896,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2177.5,
"text": " What? Everything? I mean the whole universe? Biochemistry? Chemistry? Consciousness? I don't know. What does it mean to have a theory? I don't understand what that means. So you much prefer grand unified theory than total? Grand unified theory. Grand unified theory somehow tied in with gravity. Have you had a chance to look at the Eric Weinstein video that I sent you?"
},
{
"end_time": 2235.52,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2206.391,
"text": " Yeah, I didn't understand it. You have to ask him about that. What about Stephen Wolfram? Have you heard of Stephen? I appreciate that they both made a lot of money. Apparently, Eric Weinstein is manager of a gauge fund, Netron fund in New York. So he's also a mathematician."
},
{
"end_time": 2264.497,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2236.357,
"text": " So he has fun with it. But these theories have not been successful. Quantum gravity, let's talk about that for a minute, because I've published papers on quantum gravity. I tried to publish on all of these things and several papers actually over the years, quite well cited actually. I published one paper in 2000"
},
{
"end_time": 2292.125,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2264.855,
"text": " called non-commutative quantum gravity, which has many citations. So you have the coordinates of space-time not commuting by momentum and position in quantum mechanics, non-commutative. Non-commutative gravity? Yeah. Moffat, okay. The problem with quantum gravity is that there are no data. Okay, let me repeat that."
},
{
"end_time": 2322.568,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2293.217,
"text": " There are no quantum gravity data. And you can't do physics without data. That is my main criticism. There may be. I mean, I'm not saying there won't be. But as of August 2020, there are no... Let's put it this way. In quantum field theory, Feynman graphs describe what's going on. Relativistic quantum field theory."
},
{
"end_time": 2350.401,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2322.978,
"text": " So you have what's called tree graphs, these are trees, okay, so you have a line here and you have a line there, these are two electrons and they interchange the photon which is a quigley line and it's just trees. But that's classical electromagnetism, it's classical electrodynamics, tree graphs. So the quantum comes in with what's called loops,"
},
{
"end_time": 2380.247,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2351.135,
"text": " So now you begin to take the lines and make them into loops, close in on loops, OK? And these loops are the quantum corrections to the classical tree graphs, OK? So let's go to gravity. In gravity, you have a neutron, two neutrons or two electrons. And they have mass, so the mass"
},
{
"end_time": 2407.039,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2381.408,
"text": " causes a graviton to be interchanged between the two massive electrons or protons, whatever. And that's classical. I can then derive from that tree graph, a graviton and two protons. I can derive Newton-Newton's law of gravity. I want to ask where law"
},
{
"end_time": 2438.148,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2408.951,
"text": " dealing with getting general activities a different business. And the loops, quantum gravity comes in when I form these loops, which are proportional to Planck's constant. Now Planck's constant comes in to the game. And these are called self-energy loops. So they're loop graphs. And there is no experiment that can determine these loop graphs. None."
},
{
"end_time": 2468.797,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2439.497,
"text": " This is where the quantum gravity comes in. So you construct a theory of gravity, quantum gravity, you know, there are lots of, there's a loop quantum gravity where you take space-time and make it into little pieces, atomic pieces, lattices, and you then try to get general relativity coming, emerging out of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2492.756,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2469.377,
"text": " spin network and all that. There's string theory where you have these strings like violin strings and one of the strings is I spin to a graviton so I did these strings oscillate and the strings are not points in space time"
},
{
"end_time": 2518.558,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2493.473,
"text": " So your issue is that they're theorizing with no constraints because there's not much data? Yes, so string theory has to be formulated in 10 dimensions or 11, otherwise it's not self-consistent. And you have to have supersymmetry. Supersymmetry has to come in, otherwise it's not self-consistent, physically speaking. What's the difference between being self-consistent and being consistent? Well, for example, you need"
},
{
"end_time": 2548.916,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2519.189,
"text": " more dimensions in string theory. Otherwise, the Lorentz algebra doesn't close. It's not Lorentz invariant. It's because the string is a surface. It's not a point. And so then I worked in string theory. I once gave a course of summer lectures at the University of Western Ontario in London for students. And I published it actually. And that turned me off string theory."
},
{
"end_time": 2575.299,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2549.326,
"text": " In fact, the claim is that string theory is finite to all orders of perturbation theory. So you take my tree graphs and my loops and you do what's called perturbation theory. The loops are perturbations on the string, on the tree graphs. And the string theory, these loops are supposed to be finite, whereas in standard quantum electron dynamics or quantum field theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 2604.821,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2576.203,
"text": " They lead to divergences. So you have to renormalize the loops. You have to take one infinity and subtract it from another to get a finite result. So the gravities, by the way, gravity is not renormalizable. This was proved by Toft and Veltman and others in the 70s. And this was a big problem."
},
{
"end_time": 2635.486,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2605.879,
"text": " And so it doesn't behave like other standard quantum field theories in particle physics. And so it's not really normal. It's just divergences. You can't get rid of them. So this is what loop chronograph is supposed to deal with. And string theory is supposed to be finite. But I discovered that I wasn't convinced that string theory is finite. There was never any rigorous proof that string theory is finite. Still up to this day?"
},
{
"end_time": 2665.196,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2635.981,
"text": " And so let's get to the phase three. What about testing these theories? Well, string theory was a theory of everything, supposedly, at all. That's where the acronym came from. And Edward Witten and so forth in the 80s claimed that this is the theory of everything, everything in particle physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2696.715,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2666.988,
"text": " So, well, no one's ever detected a higher dimension beyond three spatial dimensions. Time is a dimension, but there's just space-time clocks versus rods. And okay, so we've never seen a higher dimension. The Large Hadron Colliders looked for them for years and find nothing, no experimental data."
},
{
"end_time": 2726.817,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2697.176,
"text": " Okay, supersymmetry, we need supersymmetry to make the fermion sector or string theory consistent. There are reasons why I say consistent, but let's go on. So they've counted for supersymmetry for years, LVC. We know supersymmetry doesn't exist up to about 3 TeV, 3 or 4 TeV, and so it's got to exist"
},
{
"end_time": 2753.729,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2727.227,
"text": " below one TV to really solve a lot of supersymmetric problems. So that's all gone. Okay. There's no evidence from supersymmetry. So the Large Hadron Collider is at 14 TV. I was been working at 13, 14, 13 TV, and they hope to get it up to 14 TV with even beyond that."
},
{
"end_time": 2781.63,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2754.735,
"text": " but you know the supersymmetric particles keep getting heavier and heavier and we can't detect them so that's gone so what's left of string theory okay there's no experimental test of string theory that you can say well this experiment's done and it passes this test and no other theory no theory without supersymmetry can fit that data"
},
{
"end_time": 2811.852,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2782.415,
"text": " This is Marshawn Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes, and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 2821.715,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2811.852,
"text": " any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 2849.309,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2821.937,
"text": " You modified gravity. Have you worked on modifying QFT? Okay, so another"
},
{
"end_time": 2880.162,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2850.316,
"text": " the standard model. Why I formulate alternatives is not because I'm trying to be a difficult person. I'm just curious about how stable, how true the so-called standard model is. How robust is it? So that's why I also I'm mentally somewhat lazy. I can't just sit and read someone's textbook."
},
{
"end_time": 2906.561,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2881.049,
"text": " So in order to learn a theory, I produce another theory. And through this, I can't produce another theory unless I really understand the so-called standard model theory. And that makes me, forces me to understand it. So this is a strange mental way of proceeding, but that's why all these alternatives come out, because I'm trying to understand the standard model by producing another one."
},
{
"end_time": 2935.606,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2908.08,
"text": " The way that I analogize it is that it would be as if someone can't watch movies or can't understand movies so they're like let me make my own movie and then I got to watch this movie and understand how this director made it in order for me to make mine and that's my actual goal is to understand this director. That's right, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 2962.585,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2936.203,
"text": " So then I got interested in the fact of renormalization theory. I mean, I published papers on particle physics after doing my PhD. So I've been doing this for years. I have PhD students working just on particle physics, quark physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2989.872,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2963.37,
"text": " I had 38 graduate students, by the way, who did PhDs. That's quite a lot. So I was interested in the following. Can you develop a theory which is ultraviolet complete, UV complete? In other words, in standard quantum field theory, these loops I was talking about,"
},
{
"end_time": 3018.712,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2990.981,
"text": " They have divergences, they're called ultraviolet, ultraviolet divergences and they have to be cancelled using renormalisation theory. So you do what's called charge and mass renormalisation and Dirac never liked renormalisation theory. He thought it was, it was unsatisfactory, it's rather artificial. You take one set of infinities and subtract from another"
},
{
"end_time": 3046.271,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 3019.087,
"text": " You know, why do you add these infinities in the first place? Feynman, in the 80s, he was interviewed. He said he wasn't satisfied with normalization theory, even though he was one of the inventors with his Nobel Prize in quantum mechanics. And so I constructed a different quantum field theory. So instead of having"
},
{
"end_time": 3081.015,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 3054.087,
"text": " or three lines meeting at a point. It's called a vertex, okay? And that's where these three particles interact, at the point. So in local quantum field theory, they interact at a point. And this point is effectively described by delta function. Invented by Dirac, by the way. We didn't like renormalization theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3111.152,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 3082.534,
"text": " And as Feynman already understood in his paper from 1947, 1950, already there you already have a problem. As soon as you introduce the delta function and the point for the Feynman graphs, you get subvergence immediately. So, delta function in mathematics is what's called a distribution. You know, you get into distribution theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3139.224,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3111.732,
"text": " So I thought, well, I'm going to give a different distribution at a point. So I use what's called the entire function. Entire function of mathematics, entire function. Time function is a digit for a distribution has an infinite number of derivatives. It has in the complex momentum square plane. There are no poles."
},
{
"end_time": 3169.377,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3139.77,
"text": " But there's a central singularity of infinity. That's the only singularity. So it's an infinite Taylor series of derivatives. So it's infinite derivative theory, OK? And so it becomes non-local. The operators become non-local. So I have a non-local field theory. But I stress that I published this, that I proved that even though the operator field operators are non-local,"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.623,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3170.196,
"text": " The theory does not violate microcosality. Microcosality is the commutator of a field at two different points, and they're supposed to vanish for space-like separation outside the light cone. And I proved that this is, even though the field operators are non-local,"
},
{
"end_time": 3226.015,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3196.391,
"text": " They still have these vanishing commutators outside the lake cone. So the theory is local, is local, even though it's called non-local. The actual result in the end is local. That's interesting. So I published a paper in 1989, physical review, a long paper during this. What's the reception been like? Proved that it was finite to all orders. It was unitary to all orders."
},
{
"end_time": 3256.101,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3227.09,
"text": " What's the reception been like? Okay, so Richard Woodard, I got to know him. He's a professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville. This was 1990. So he came up to Toronto to give some lectures. I invited him up. He said, what are you doing? I said, non-local field theory. What? He said, well, that can't work. I said, well, I'm publishing this paper. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3286.578,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3256.698,
"text": " So six weeks later in comes an email we were already emailing then saying I've had epiphany epiphany I think this is really interesting let's collaborate so we collaborated with myself and his student and my student my postdoc and we published a long paper in physical review"
},
{
"end_time": 3316.186,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3287.466,
"text": " where we did quantum electrodynamics from start to finish everything and proved that the theory is unitary to all this is s matrix it's unitary orders all the perturbation loops of finite orders and the tree graphs work and that so we really went to town on this so that paper's had many citations okay right so"
},
{
"end_time": 3342.5,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3316.63,
"text": " People are publishing, just the other day a paper came out, they're coming out citing my papers. I've had hundreds of citations on this. So I got back into this recently because I switched, I thought I'd be done enough black holes and gravity, let's do some particle physics for a change."
},
{
"end_time": 3369.531,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3343.404,
"text": " So I look back into the standard model and the Higgs particle has been discovered. The discovery of the Higgs particle is, the narrative for that is in my book, Cracking the Particle Court of the Universe, Oxford University Press, no, Tom Collins, Harper Collins. It says Oxford on something. Yeah, yeah. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3402.824,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3373.677,
"text": " So what you do is you have, the strong nuclear force is called quantum chromodynamics, and you have clocks, all the clocks, and the photon in this case, the quantum is the gluon, and the gluon is colored. And when you say photon in quotations, you mean the particle that mediates the force? The medium of the force. The mediator of the force."
},
{
"end_time": 3433.968,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3404.036,
"text": " And then you have electromagnetism, electrothermics, QED is called, and you have electroweak, and these are put together, were put together by Clashow and basically as SU3 cos SU2 cos U1. SU3 is the colour, nuclear force, strong force group"
},
{
"end_time": 3462.688,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3435.452,
"text": " SU2 is the... SU2 cross U1 is the... Electroweak. Electroweak. And the U1 is the electromagnetism. So these are the three forces of nature put together in this, it's called simple group. And why is it SU3 cross SU2 cross U1? So how do they do this? Okay, well, in order to get a renormalizable theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 3491.971,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3463.951,
"text": " We use a delta function for the graph, Feynman graphs at the point, local field theory. You need a gauge theory. The theory has to be gauge invariant. And corner electron dynamics is gauge invariant because the photon is massless. So massless theories are gauge invariant, and gauge invariant theories are normalizable."
},
{
"end_time": 3519.565,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3494.514,
"text": " Now the quantum chromodynamics, SU3, the gluons are massless. Hooray! We have a gauge theory. All right. It's renormalizable. It's called QCD, quantum chromodynamics. What about the weak force? There's always been a problem. So the weak force, these forces are described by, fields are described by Yang-Gou's theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3546.51,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3520.23,
"text": " Yang-Mills theory is what's called in mathematics a non-abelian gauge theory. It's gauge theory. The particle mediating particles are matchless. Okay, so for a long time the problem was that the electric weak is not matchless because the mediating particles are the z or the z."
},
{
"end_time": 3577.415,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3547.534,
"text": " bosons and the W bosons. There are three of them. Two W charged and one neutral. They're not massless. In fact, they're thick masses. And the fermions are not massless. The electron is in quarks. The top quark is the heaviest quark is 173 GeV compared to the electron which has a mass of half a MeV. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3607.875,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3577.91,
"text": " Okay, so SU211 is not a gauging variant, so it can't be renormalized. You can prove this. What to do? This took a long time. So, the scalar field was invented, the Higgs field, which has the quantum numbers of the vacuum. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 3639.172,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3609.206,
"text": " what they had to do was to say that the electroweak starts with zero mass so we put all the masses to zero the w the z and the photons zero mass okay well you know the 173 gv is put to zero okay and the the uh w mass the z mass was 90 gv or so zero"
},
{
"end_time": 3669.428,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3639.872,
"text": " Okay, well, everything is fine. So then what they said was that the Higgs field, the so-called Higgs mechanism, breaks SU2 cross U1, down to U1. So you break the electroweak down to the electromagnetic. And during this process, the Higgs field produces the masses. Magic, okay. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3700.094,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3671.715,
"text": " Great. Now that thing is renormalizable. So this Higgs field has what's called a potential, potential V of phi. Phi is the Higgs field. And it's equal to V of phi equals lambda phi to the fourth. Phi is the fourth power of the scalar Higgs field. Assume that. If you assume that, then you can get what's called Higgs"
},
{
"end_time": 3725.879,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3700.572,
"text": " mechanism. It's the breaking of the Higgs symmetry SU2 cross SU1, which is supposed to produce the masses. You keep drawing this because the Mexican had or is this referring to something else? That's right. So this is all done at the classical level, the Higgs mechanism, not the quantum level. It's classical."
},
{
"end_time": 3761.869,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3732.432,
"text": " where you have coupling of massive particles with the Higgs field you multiply them together to interact and for example the electron field multiplies the spinor electron direct field multiplies the Higgs scalar field stuff and they have a coupling constant g g sub e for electron so"
},
{
"end_time": 3789.309,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3762.449,
"text": " Where do the masses come from? Well, it turns out that the symmetry breaking can sort of produce the W and the Z mass. You can get a prediction for the W and the Z mass, which looks reasonably good. But the fermion masses, all the quarks and leptons and so on, they have to be put in by hand."
},
{
"end_time": 3817.039,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3790.981,
"text": " And each mass has a coupling constant, and this is called Yukawa-Lagrangian, which is just fitted by hand. So you endeavor to calculate the masses. It's put in by hand as a free parameter. That's why the sterling world has something like 21 or 26 free parameters depending on how you count. It's lots of parameters. So"
},
{
"end_time": 3844.718,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3817.381,
"text": " I looked at this and I thought, okay, well, let me do my finite quantum field theory, as I call it. And it works whether you have masses or not, because it has a renormalization, but it's a finite renormalization. There are no infinities. So I don't have to worry about putting the masses to zero. So I rewrote the standard model, assuming that the masses are not zero, that the symmetry is what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3874.889,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3845.486,
"text": " And when you came up with this, this was before the Higgs was discovered? Yeah, when I did that, I was doing this before the Higgs. But then when the Higgs was found, I had to put this in as a particle field, which I did. And by the way, you need the Higgs field still. I don't need it for renormalization. And"
},
{
"end_time": 3901.425,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3875.742,
"text": " and I don't need it for producing the masses okay but you do need it because without the Higgs exchange between two quarks you violate what's called unitarity at a perturbation level already at about 600 GeV this is bad so then when you put in the Higgs field"
},
{
"end_time": 3930.981,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3902.09,
"text": " And to redo the calculation, it cancels all the unitary violations. So this means you get unity. You have to have unitarity. Probability has to be conserved. So you still need to... Okay, so I redid the whole thing and made everything finite, did all the calculations, proved that I get all the low energy experiments of the Hadron Collider. And now comes the problem."
},
{
"end_time": 3960.708,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3932.875,
"text": " How do I calculate the masses? No one's ever been able to do it. The Fermi masses. So I work on this occasionally, and I have a way of doing it. So Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel Prize for initiating this idea of the Higgs mechanism and putting all masses to zero for leptons, it's called the lepton model at the time."
},
{
"end_time": 3991.664,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3961.749,
"text": " He has recently published a paper trying to solve the problem of the masses. Steven Weinberg is very clever, by the way. Steven Weinberg is still alive? Yes, he's about my age. I think he's brilliant. But he failed to do it by his own admission. Was he using your modified quantum field theory? No, he was just doing the standard"
},
{
"end_time": 4020.009,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3992.346,
"text": " So another criticism is that there's no experimental data that shows that this Higgs potential is lambda, which is a coupling constant, lambda times phi to the fourth. In order to do an experimental verification, you need a Higgs decaying into two other Higgs's, or three. And this is the amplitude for this."
},
{
"end_time": 4050.401,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 4020.691,
"text": " decay product is tiniest. So there's no evidence for this potential. That's the standard tale that I've heard and that everyone has heard. Yeah, it is. The statement is that the quarks and the electrons move through this Higgs field vacuum field molasses and they're moving very slowly and the heavier particles move in the molasses slower than the faster ones. This is all okay. I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 4081.357,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 4051.357,
"text": " It's a hypothesis, a theory, and I don't necessarily believe in it."
},
{
"end_time": 4109.77,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 4081.357,
"text": " but we don't see its mechanism in the way that you're saying the mechanism exists. We just see the Higgs and the Higgs can be explained alternatively via your theory at least. The point is that all experiments with Higgs particles, all you ever do experimentally is look at what's called the decay products because these particles are so short-lived. They only live"
},
{
"end_time": 4138.575,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 4110.691,
"text": " 10 to the power of minus 20, 10 to the minus 22, 10 to the minus 23 seconds. So you can scatter the eggs off one another, like you scatter off electrons. Electrons are stable particles and protons are stable. You can scatter them by these things. So what you do is you do experiments on the decay products. How does this heavy particle decay into the"
},
{
"end_time": 4167.995,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 4139.121,
"text": " others and so on and from that you extract the electroweak physics. So there are times I published papers where I did way back some years ago, Mexican hat but now we're violating special relative Lorentz invariance okay and so we violated so"
},
{
"end_time": 4194.753,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4168.541,
"text": " 3,1 down to SO2. And so the Mexican hat, you remember you go around the rim and you have different arrows. So I choose to break the arrow in the direction of time for cosmology. And so I start with a very low entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 4215.981,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4195.657,
"text": " and the entropy increases as the universe expands. That's an explanation for the error of time through violation of Lorentz invariance. But this happens fractions of seconds after the Big Bang. The violation of Lorentz invariance"
},
{
"end_time": 4245.572,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4217.705,
"text": " In experiments today, forget it. For me, the violation occurs seconds of fragments, fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, and then through a phase transition goes directly to the speed of light that we measure today. That's important. Whereas if you violate Lorentz invariance, the way Bekenstein did with Milgram's"
},
{
"end_time": 4275.162,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4246.015,
"text": " I went to one of his lectures at Caltech and he gave lectures on quantum field theory and I sat in the audience"
},
{
"end_time": 4304.616,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4276.22,
"text": " And he was lecturing away and I pulled my hand up, just crashed my head. And he looked at me, yes, do you have a question? I said, I'm just crashing my head. He said, well, that's legitimate. You're allowed to do that. He had a great sense of humor. I also met Gell-Mann, of course. I knew Gell-Mann quite well, Murray Gell-Mann. It's in my, this, funny stories, anecdotes."
},
{
"end_time": 4328.865,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4305.23,
"text": " By the way, I wanted to check the following. That when you modify gravity today, okay, and you think you can do it without dark matter or dark energy or explain dark energy, that's another dark issue. You had to fit all the data. You can't cherry pick the data."
},
{
"end_time": 4353.951,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4329.224,
"text": " So Mon does okay for galaxies. It doesn't do well for clusters. This is well known. Okay. So I have to fit, Mark has to fit galaxy data. It has to fit what's called the lensing data. I just published a paper on that, another one. So it has to fit all the cosmological data. It's a huge amount of data."
},
{
"end_time": 4381.63,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4354.377,
"text": " So life has become very difficult for those people who think they can modify gravity, okay, as you have to fit all the data. Otherwise, someone comes along and says, you're okay, you fit the galaxies, or you fitted that. But what about the cosmology? What about the do you fit the acoustical power spectrum at this cosmic microwave background? Do you fit the matter power spectrum? That's the"
},
{
"end_time": 4411.886,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4382.176,
"text": " spectrum for statistical analysis of pairs of galaxies and to fit the structure growth of cosmology. So all of this has to be fitted. So I had to learn all of this. You have to do all the astronomy and you have to do all the cosmology, solar system, data, everything has to be fitted. And so far MOG is"
},
{
"end_time": 4439.991,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4413.046,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 4467.022,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4440.845,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 4485.947,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4467.022,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the"
},
{
"end_time": 4511.766,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4485.947,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now are you ready to start your own success story?"
},
{
"end_time": 4540.862,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4511.766,
"text": " Leading theories of gravity without matter, okay? And the galaxy fits so very good into what I know."
},
{
"end_time": 4569.036,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4541.408,
"text": " cluster fits them that are cosmology but there's something called dwarf galaxies it's very normal dwarf galaxies in our galaxy these are tiny galaxies and uh they have what's called very large mass to light ratios m over l which are huge so the idea is that the dark matter dominates them but um"
},
{
"end_time": 4586.8,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4569.565,
"text": " The problem is that they're probably not virulized. Some of these 12 galleys are not stable. Tidal deformation destroys the stability of the virulization and so you can't use them as data. So that's how it goes."
},
{
"end_time": 4611.084,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4593.285,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 4639.565,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4611.084,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 4655.93,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4639.565,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 4685.128,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4655.93,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. So what are you working on these days? Well, let's see."
},
{
"end_time": 4711.578,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4685.35,
"text": " I've been working on my modified gravity, which I call, the acronym is MOG, which stands for modified gravity, but privately modified Moffitt gravity. Moffitt gravity. But it's not public, it's private. Right, right. Yes, and there are various issues I've been developing."
},
{
"end_time": 4739.838,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4712.568,
"text": " generalizations of Einstein's gravity theory already at the PhD level in Cambridge, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and over the years. But I've worked on many other subjects. Yes, so developing this theory. I also work on quantum field theory and particle physics and cosmology."
},
{
"end_time": 4768.063,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4740.998,
"text": " Those are my three main areas. Why don't you tell the audience a bit about your books? Yeah, so this is my latest book, The Shadow of the Black Hole. The Oxford University Press publication just came out. It's a history of the gravitational waves, their detection by LIGO observatory. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4799.036,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4769.48,
"text": " the history of black holes. And so the book has a narrative description of LIGO detection of gravitational waves and also the observation of the first image of a black hole in the galaxy M31. And so that's"
},
{
"end_time": 4828.985,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4799.206,
"text": " the book. I also published a memoir Einstein wrote back some years ago and this is my first book Reinventing Gravity which has a history of gravity starting from prehistoric times and through the Greeks and the history of how gravity developed"
},
{
"end_time": 4857.381,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4829.292,
"text": " through Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. And then this is the book before my latest, Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe. It's the history of particle physics and the ramifications of quantum field theory in that"
},
{
"end_time": 4886.391,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4857.637,
"text": " When you were mentioning the Schwarzschild radius and the equations, you said that it's dependent on the choice of coordinates, the singularity. Can you explain to the audience, because to them they might think, well, what do you mean dependent on a choice of coordinate system? First of all, what the heck is a coordinate system and why does the singularity depend on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4911.152,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4886.852,
"text": " Yes, well the original solution, the Schwarzschild solution, published by Schwarzschild, who was an astronomer. And by the way, he did the work in the trenches of the First World War. He was in the military, German military, in the artillery. And Einstein thought that his equation was so complex that"
},
{
"end_time": 4938.234,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4911.493,
"text": " finding an exact solution would be near impossible. And then one year later, Swordchild, while in the trenches, came up with the solution. He actually went back to Berlin and wrote it up there, but then he developed an autoimmune disease, an immune disease, which killed him. He died not soon after publishing the paper. So, yeah, so they,"
},
{
"end_time": 4969.155,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4939.343,
"text": " In the original mathematical solution, one uses what's called Schwarzschild coordinates. The coordinates are x, y, z, three-dimensional, and time is the fourth dimension. So that produces spacetime. And you can choose other coordinates. For example, if you do a picture of the Earth, the planet,"
},
{
"end_time": 4995.759,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4969.599,
"text": " You can use polar coordinates or other kinds of coordinates to determine the structure of Earth. So if you use polar coordinates, you get a singularity on the North and South Pole. And similarly in the Schwarzschild solution, the horizon, the Schwarzschild radius, is singular in Schwarzschild coordinates, but you choose other coordinates."
},
{
"end_time": 5026.152,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4996.493,
"text": " For example, it was the mathematicians from Princeton published a paper where they did what's called analytic continuation of the Schwarzschild coordinates space to a much bigger space in which the actual membrane of the horizon was not singular. So this was a problem because"
},
{
"end_time": 5054.923,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 5026.988,
"text": " Einstein wasn't aware of this issue of coordinates. People didn't believe in the black holes because it was singular. Einstein didn't like singularities in his theory. He always tried to avoid them. This prevented them, this issue of the singular surface horizon prevented them from believing in these black holes."
},
{
"end_time": 5085.333,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 5056.22,
"text": " But eventually that was cleared up in the early 60s. So then from that understanding of not having a singular membrane surface, a raised surface, one could begin to believe that these black holes made mathematical sense. And by the way, there's another singularity for the black hole. When a star collapses because it has a large mass, too massive"
},
{
"end_time": 5113.78,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 5086.22,
"text": " to sustain itself, it collapses because the pressure due to what's called degenerate gas, neutron gas for example, a neutron particle gas, the pressure there is not big enough to balance due to the attraction of gravity so the star collapses and it collapses in Einstein's classical theory to a singularity at the centre"
},
{
"end_time": 5142.517,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 5114.377,
"text": " the coordinate center which is radially, the distance radially is zero at the center. And this singularity has bothered physicists from the beginning and this is an issue which I can get to eventually. So these are the two possible singularities. The singular singularities at the center in Einstein's classical theory"
},
{
"end_time": 5172.363,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 5142.875,
"text": " is there. You can't avoid it by choosing another coordinate system. It's called essential singularity. Whereas as I explained for the horizon, you can choose different coordinates and not have a singular surface. So the coordinate singularities are more like figments of your coordinate choice and the essential singularity is one that is truer? That's right. It's always there in the classical theory of gravity, Einstein's theory. You started studying physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5202.295,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5172.722,
"text": " When I had an unusual background, I left school when I was 15 because I wanted to be an artist. What kind of artist? I paint. I still paint."
},
{
"end_time": 5232.654,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5203.148,
"text": " an abstract painting. So I joined, I went to Paris when I was 17, just turned 17. And I had learned about Serge Polyakov, an abstract painter, who had exhibited paintings in Copenhagen before I left for Paris. And I was very impressed with his work. So I looked him up. He lived in a wooded cell. How do you look him up? This is before the internet."
},
{
"end_time": 5263.695,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5234.172,
"text": " I looked him up in the sense of not the internet. I went to his house. He had a little apartment. He lived there with his wife, Madame Polyakov. He just showed up at his house. A 17-year-old kid. 17-year-old kid. And he had his little boy, Alex Polyakov. And that's where he painted this room. And he played the guitar at night because he wasn't well known at all."
},
{
"end_time": 5293.507,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5265.128,
"text": " Then he became famous, and I was there with him for about a year. So you showed up at his house, you stayed for a year? No, no, I had a room in Port-au-Lion, outside near the suburbs of Paris. Just one room. I had saved up some money to be in Paris, but the money was running out and I couldn't find any employment because I was British, Danish."
},
{
"end_time": 5323.899,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5294.957,
"text": " I was a British citizen because of my father. And so I painted. So one day he said, bring some paintings along to the studio and we're going to show you in a show at the Musée d'Art Moderne Avenue in Paris. So all of a sudden I have four paintings up, four or five."
},
{
"end_time": 5353.217,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5324.906,
"text": " and this big museum, modern art museum. And I was surrounded by these abstract painters, Vassarelli, Modigliani, Polyakov, who are now famous names in art. So you were there before it was cool, before it was famous. Before I was sent, I was interviewed by"
},
{
"end_time": 5383.541,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5354.804,
"text": " journalist for Le Monde and other Figaro because I was 17, very young, to be exhibited at such a famous installation. The exhibition was called Réalité Nouvelle, actually. It was a spring exhibition every spring in Paris. So I got to know these famous artists and"
},
{
"end_time": 5413.131,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5384.497,
"text": " I was with them for a year, and then I ran out of money. I had to go back to Copenhagen and go back living with my parents again, small apartment. And I got interested in, I started reading voraciously everything, classics."
},
{
"end_time": 5442.21,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5413.797,
"text": " Are you a quick reader? No. I'm slow. I'm slow at everything. Carefully. That tends to be true of mathematicians. It turns out that if you study IQ and IQ can fractionate into mathematical and verbal IQ, that verbal IQ is inversely proportional to mathematical. So the more highly gifted you are mathematically, the less you are verbally. And then the reverse tends to be true. I must say at this school, I was not a very good student."
},
{
"end_time": 5466.954,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5443.131,
"text": " The only subject I did well in was chemistry. For some reason, I was fascinated by chemistry. But not physics? No, physics and math. You didn't care too much about it? I didn't care about it. I didn't find it interesting. And this is around 15? No, this is around"
},
{
"end_time": 5496.34,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5467.961,
"text": " 10, 11, 12, 10. We were living in Glasgow at the time. What year is this? This would be 1942, 43. So this is during the war? During the war. Anyway, so actually when I left school in Copenhagen, I did try to get into university and I went... In those days in Copenhagen, you"
},
{
"end_time": 5526.988,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5497.619,
"text": " went to what's called gymnasium. It's something like the old German system, educational system. And then you went into the university. So I was interviewed by this school teacher to see where I should be admitted to the gymnasium, which is the portal for university. And he asked me that I should say, by the way,"
},
{
"end_time": 5557.585,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5527.875,
"text": " during the war in Bristol. This was 1942 in the Battle of Britain, July August 1940. There were bombings day and night and I did schooling on the ground, way underground, with sandbags. It was terrible and the teaching was very quiet, not very good. And anyway, so we went on a vacation to"
},
{
"end_time": 5587.483,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5558.592,
"text": " western super marina seaside resort coast of england we were walking along the beach road promenade and suddenly these two misha smith bombers came up i looked i could see the pilots and the plane planes and they dropped six bombs and they fell on the beach which is why this is to that tennis court"
},
{
"end_time": 5616.664,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5588.166,
"text": " That's not too far. Not too far. So they went into the sand, which somewhat muffled the blast, but we were blown across the street. So I suffer from PTSD. I still do actually, to some extent. Did you suffer any physical injuries? Yeah, I suffered a concussion."
},
{
"end_time": 5646.937,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5617.637,
"text": " So this had an effect on me. Back to the interview by the school teacher. I'm flashing back and forward. Right. He asked me these questions at the Blackboard mathematics. Because of my, what we now call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, I just froze. I couldn't, I froze. And I couldn't answer any questions. So he said,"
},
{
"end_time": 5674.753,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5647.585,
"text": " He said, I can tell you, Moffat, that I'm actually sure you'll never become a mathematician. And he rejected me. I was rejected from going to the gymnasium. That was the end of the possibility of attending university in Denmark. So anyway, back to Paris, Copenhagen again. I got interested in"
},
{
"end_time": 5704.411,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5675.265,
"text": " And I did a lot of reading. So I read Arthur Eddington's books, popular books. I got very interested in that, in the physics and astronomy. And I started getting excited about that. So I decided this was something to pursue. So I started learning math and physics. So it turned out that I could attend the library, the university library, the University of Copenhagen library."
},
{
"end_time": 5734.002,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5705.094,
"text": " and get books on physics and maths, which is unusual for cities. You can't do that in the University of Toronto. The Royal Basin Library, you have to be a member of the university. But back then, any member of the public could take out the university. The public could go in. So I took out these books on maths and physics. So then it just suddenly clicked."
},
{
"end_time": 5759.411,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5734.701,
"text": " Within about a week or two, I learned calculus, trigonometry. Within... So you found that you had a natural aptitude for that? I had a natural aptitude for that. Or did you find some trick that helped you absorb that? I have to tell you, I never understood how I did this. To this day, you don't understand? I still don't understand it. And within"
},
{
"end_time": 5786.152,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5759.855,
"text": " A couple of months I was moving fast, okay. I was going through all our mathematics and physics. You must have had some great books too. Yeah, I had somehow understood as I moved forward what to look for, what books to look for. And so within six months I got up to general relativity and"
},
{
"end_time": 5816.084,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5787.722,
"text": " Then I did general relativity within a month. Okay, for people listening, you went from a teacher saying that you're never going to learn mathematics, to you also not knowing much of mathematics at that time, to then you picking up your first book in the library for whatever reason you were curious about it, to then learning general relativity in the span of six months when you were around 15 or so. No, 1920. After that I had no interest in"
},
{
"end_time": 5841.049,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5817.551,
"text": " When you say Einstein's unified field theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 5868.609,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5841.51,
"text": " You're not referring to general relativity? No, this is what he called the non-symmetric theory of gravitation. He called it generalization of gravitation theory. He didn't call it unified field theory, generalization of gravity. Ah, okay, because this was around the time when Einstein was publishing. People, like for example me, we don't know much about what Einstein published that didn't work. We're only taught what worked, which is GR and the special relativity first."
},
{
"end_time": 5895.572,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5869.019,
"text": " I actually don't know about the specifics of his Unified Field Theory attempts. A lot of this is described in my book Reinventing Gravity. I go through the whole history of this. After 1915-16 publication of general relativity, Einstein kept publishing applications like Detection of Gravitational Waves,"
},
{
"end_time": 5922.005,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5895.947,
"text": " his famous book on cosmology and so on, his famous article on cosmology, but he was more interested in unifying electromagnetism with gravity and making the one geometrical theory, okay, and then he started this in about 1918, 1919,"
},
{
"end_time": 5952.398,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5923.404,
"text": " Isn't general relativity already compatible with electromagnetism? It was, because you can incorporate Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism into general relativity in what's called a covariant way, a way of not being dependent on any particular coordinate system. It's called the Einstein-Maxwell theory. And it is, but Maxwell's equations are not unified with gravity, so to speak, in a geometrical structure."
},
{
"end_time": 5981.118,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5952.978,
"text": " So he worked on and off on these unified theories, his generalization of gravitation theory, his theory. In 1925, for example, he followed collusion and worked on higher dimensional gravity to include the electromagnetic field of Maxwell's equations. And he wasn't happy with that."
},
{
"end_time": 6006.408,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5983.063,
"text": " And then he, Weill, Herman Weill, the famous German mathematician who published a book, famous book on Einstein's theory of gravity called Matter and Space-Time and Matter. He developed a unified theory called the Weill Unified Field Theory."
},
{
"end_time": 6031.493,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 6007.432,
"text": " And this was actually the beginnings of what's called gauge theory in quantum field theory, quantum physics. But that failed because Einstein criticized it. There was a problem with understanding how clocks work in the theory because of this so-called gauge theory. But then in 1925 Einstein"
},
{
"end_time": 6060.333,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 6032.637,
"text": " generalized his general relativity theory by saying the following. General relativity is based on a spacetime metric, which is a symmetric metric, it's a symmetric tensor, okay? g mu nu, it's called, where mu nu run over spacetime coordinates one to four."
},
{
"end_time": 6088.831,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 6063.763,
"text": " So he said well why should this metric, this tensor be symmetric? It can be non-symmetric. You have a symmetric plus an anti-symmetric part added together. Just let me explain this a bit to the audience. So there's a metric which is a two tensor and a tensor is what you can think of as taking two vectors, you know what a vector is, and then outputting"
},
{
"end_time": 6119.002,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 6089.462,
"text": " what your underlying field is which in most of the cases it's the real numbers so that is you eat two vectors give me two vectors and I'll give you a real number and you have to satisfy some conditions like linearity and so on you can also switch those two vectors so you can say give me a vector a give me one vector and then give me another one or give me that one and then give me the other one so give me a and b or give me b and a and then if the result is the same in your calculation then you call it symmetric okay that's right"
},
{
"end_time": 6149.616,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 6120.009,
"text": " So yes, so anyway he developed the mathematics for this and published it as a paper in 1925. There was a lot of excitement about any publication that he produced because 1925 was famous but the Binding of Light verified general relativity in 1919. Arthur Heddington's expedition"
},
{
"end_time": 6180.589,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 6150.811,
"text": " to Africa and solar eclipse and so on and so the anyway so back to the non-symmetric theory. Then he left it and tried other made other attempts to have a unified theory. He felt they failed. So 1945 in collaboration with"
},
{
"end_time": 6206.766,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 6181.152,
"text": " Strauss. He was Einstein's assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he now is, okay, 1945 professor there in the Institute. He went back to the non-symmetric theory and worked with Strauss, but there was a problem because the field equations of the theory"
},
{
"end_time": 6233.916,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 6209.241,
"text": " attractive, beautiful looking. It's quite natural to generalize Einstein's theory. There's no reason why this tensor should be symmetric. And so what's called the connection to which is associated with the metric tensor at the affine connection is also non-symmetric in this theory."
},
{
"end_time": 6256.971,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6234.531,
"text": " has a symmetric part which is the affine connection which is not a tensor and the skew anti-symmetric part the skew part which is is a tensor anyway so uh it turned out that the field equations which are supposed to describe Maxwell's equations were not Maxwell's equations"
},
{
"end_time": 6285.469,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6257.568,
"text": " And he couldn't get the equation of motion for a charged particle. It was called the Lorentz force law. Hendrik Lorentz, a tax physicist, developed this at the turn of the 20th century. The Lorentz force on the charged particle didn't come out of the theory. It was very bad, serious."
},
{
"end_time": 6316.425,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6287.483,
"text": " So people criticized this in publications and so I looked at his theory and I found another problem with it. So he did at that time he had what's called an emission metric tensor so he had the symmetric power was real and the anti-symmetric power was in the measuring quantity measuring square root of minus one times the measuring part"
},
{
"end_time": 6344.411,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6317.261,
"text": " and I found a problem with the Lagrangian, what's called the action principle from which you get the filthy questions. So I wrote him a letter and I wrote two papers actually. That is to say you found a problem with the Lagrangian or the action? Yeah, the structure of the action as to whether it was real or not. The Lagrangian has to be real, okay, otherwise you get into trouble with"
},
{
"end_time": 6374.991,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6345.589,
"text": " The development of the theory is not self-consistent. So I wrote these two papers. I typed on an old typewriter. With the math symbols on the old typewriter too? No, I had to put them in by a pen. It's all very primitive compared to what we do today. And I sent him these manuscripts and a letter. I never expected to hear from him, because I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 6405.06,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6376.015,
"text": " famous Einstein. People were writing to him all the time. It'd be like writing Obama and then Obama replying to it. Exactly. However, my criticism was correct. 20 or 22? I was 20. I looked at the manuscripts and"
},
{
"end_time": 6433.063,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6405.555,
"text": " Hmm, okay. So you corrected Einstein. Yeah, so I'm not correct. I'm, I question what he was doing. And so he, it's amazing, and a letter comes in from, from Princeton, from Mercer Street, where he had his house, and discussing my paper, papers, and, and"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.886,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6434.48,
"text": " discussing this issue I raised and so on. So we got into a correspondence and this went on for some months and I also criticized the fact that he was only unifying gravity with electromagnetism and that we knew about the nuclear force. I mean it was already nuclear, what we call nuclear physics. So how can you leave that out? Okay and he responded to that."
},
{
"end_time": 6492.159,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6463.251,
"text": " So then we had a friend, my father had a friend who was a chemist and living he called me an American and he got to hear about me and then he somehow got Niels Bohr at the born attitude"
},
{
"end_time": 6521.408,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6492.705,
"text": " got to hear about me and so I was invited to the Bohr Institute and I was interviewed by Niels Bohr for two hours. He criticized Einstein because people felt Einstein was wasting his time. Bohr criticized Einstein? Yeah and said that Albert was wasting his time and he said Albert's like an alchemist"
},
{
"end_time": 6549.957,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6522.91,
"text": " tried to turn lead into gold and so on and so on. I just sat there, famous Nobel Prize winner thinks that another famous Nobel Prize winner is wasting his time, okay. I didn't think Einstein was wasting his time, but he was doing unified theory before it ever became popular at all, okay. And he was actually ignored at institute"
},
{
"end_time": 6578.387,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6551.527,
"text": " by physicists. All of his work was just wasting time. So I was a British citizen, you see, because I never became a Danish citizen because I was born in Copenhagen, but I took my father's citizenship. So I got in touch with the consulate, the British Consulate in Copenhagen,"
},
{
"end_time": 6608.78,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6581.152,
"text": " I got in touch with the Department of Scientific Industrial Research in London and they invited me to London. So I went there and they arranged for me to be interviewed by professors to see whether I was the real article or some"
},
{
"end_time": 6634.838,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6610.213,
"text": " figment of somebody's imagination, including my own. And I was interviewed by William McCray, a professor in London University, and then I was sent to William Bono, a professor at Liverpool University, who was working on the Einstein's Unifiable"
},
{
"end_time": 6660.23,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6637.466,
"text": " Einstein's theory for the fact that you could get the equation of motion for a charged particle from the theory and also that Maxwell's equations didn't look like Maxwell's equations as they should do. So then I was sent to Dublin to do an advanced study in Dublin"
},
{
"end_time": 6689.36,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6661.203,
"text": " And Robin Schrodinger, the famous Robin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger equation was director of the institute. So I went there and I went up and he was interviewed by Schrodinger. He sat on his bed with a little cap on his head and a small bedroom. And he had my papers, which I had sent Einstein."
},
{
"end_time": 6709.991,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6690.623,
"text": " No, I had copies and I had just given them to Bohr and the department that I was invited to in London and so on people and they sent it to Schrodinger."
},
{
"end_time": 6739.189,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6710.896,
"text": " So then he got angry and said, why are you using Albert's methods to do this theory? Because Schrodinger was working on the non-symmetric theory. He published several papers. I was in the, in the, um, uh, pursuing the Royal Irish Academy, uh, which published papers on Greek philosophy and all sorts of issues. And, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6768.865,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6740.282,
"text": " There was a dispute between Einstein and Schrodinger, it turned out, because Schrodinger was interviewed by newspapers because of his publication of Unified Field Theory and claimed that he had solved the problem, but was not happy about this because he had solved the problem. So they had this dispute."
},
{
"end_time": 6797.21,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6769.275,
"text": " and Paoli had to intervene because they got it got rather poor Albert threatened to sue Schweringer anyway so Paoli damped things out Wolfgang Paoli famous physicist Nobel Prize winner and anyway so this was the atmosphere I was interviewed"
},
{
"end_time": 6827.193,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6798.336,
"text": " And so, Schrodinger had his way of deriving the non-symmetric theory, and Einstein had his way doing it. And Schrodinger was angry because I wasn't using it as a way. Why are you not using my way? I said, I will do that in the future. And I had to be diplomatic. Anyway, so back to London."
},
{
"end_time": 6858.268,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6828.524,
"text": " So the next thing is that Schrodinger sent a letter to the people in London, this department of scientific research in London. And the letter of recommendation must have been something, because the next thing is I'm sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, to be interviewed by Dennis Sharma, who was a student of Paul Dirac."
},
{
"end_time": 6885.282,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6859.855,
"text": " and he was a Darden Fellow of Trinity College and he was also a lecturer at the time at Cambridge University and so I was interviewed by Shama in his rooms at Trinity and after about 20 minutes he said come with me so we walk across the Trinity Great Court lawns"
},
{
"end_time": 6915.418,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6885.947,
"text": " Only a dawn can walk on the lawns, but I was with him. I can't see him. And the other way he had to walk on the gravel path. And taking to the brochure's office, the Trinity, and Dennis said, this gentleman, John Moffitt, has to be matriculated as a PhD student. And this is without an undergraduate degree nor a master's. So they looked into this person. He said, but he doesn't have any degree."
},
{
"end_time": 6945.725,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6916.049,
"text": " It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No. Okay. So I'm articulating him. And yes. Okay. All right. So that so I was given a supervisor, professor, supervisor, Fred Hoyle. And I went to see him at St. John's College. These rooms. He said, Well, you don't have an undergraduate degree."
},
{
"end_time": 6974.872,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6946.288,
"text": " No. Well, maybe you should think about taking the tripods exams. These are the famous exams and the crisis exams at Cambridge. There's something called the mathematics tripods, first part and second part and so on. And, well, I was rather precocious and somewhat arrogant, I should say, as a young man. I felt that"
},
{
"end_time": 7004.292,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6975.316,
"text": " So I said, well, Professor Hoyle is just going to waste my time because I know all this, okay? So he looked at me dubiously. He went through the tripods himself. In his biography, Hoyle's biography, he had problems with that getting through. And he was brilliant, of course, but there were very hard exams."
},
{
"end_time": 7030.043,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 7004.991,
"text": " And so he's probably thought, well, if I had to do this, why is this person 20, 21 year old, you know, so I can understand his attitude. So I decided that something should be done about this. So I wrote three papers within two or three months. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7058.763,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 7031.63,
"text": " submitted to the proceedings of Cambridge Philosophical Society and the first paper was very mathematical, it was a generalization of Romanian geometry and the other two were my first modified gravity theory and long papers. The paper on the, I was trying to unify gravity and electromagnetism"
},
{
"end_time": 7089.36,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 7059.684,
"text": " in my own way, okay, so I invented this now, not Schrodinger, no, this is a different way of doing it, and they accepted them, three papers, so I mean the Cambridge proceedings has an ancient history, I mean famous mathematicians and physicists have published their, Schrodinger published papers there, the quantum mechanics, so I went back to"
},
{
"end_time": 7117.159,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 7089.582,
"text": " Fred Hoyle and I gave him the papers when he sat and looked at them and he said well forget about the tripod exam just continue with what you're doing. That was it. So I did my own research. I went had to go to California to do his steady state theory and"
},
{
"end_time": 7147.261,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 7117.602,
"text": " work with Fowler, working Fowler at the Caltech in Pasadena and visit other institutions. So I had to get another supervisor. So I got up to Salam, who was at that time a lecturer at St. John's College, where Dirac was, and I just did my own thing. I attended two courses. I never took any exams."
},
{
"end_time": 7178.49,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 7148.592,
"text": " How was Dirac as a teacher, as a lecturer? Very good, very clear, excellent. Did he speak much? He has a reputation. He started off with a loud voice and to make sure that"
},
{
"end_time": 7207.09,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 7179.002,
"text": " he was being heard and then even especially in the back of the classroom a lot of the students attended, all the graduate students, research students attended in physics because they were famous. It's based on his book on quantum mechanics and then his voice would be some more muted because he realized that people were beginning to, that the people were able to understand his speech"
},
{
"end_time": 7237.056,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 7208.541,
"text": " Anyway, so I continued my work on general relativity. I worked on the equations of motion in general relativity. It's what's called the Einstein-Nuffel-Hoffmann method. And I worked on my unified theory. This was going to be my thesis. And then I switched to particle physics because I was already well ahead with"
},
{
"end_time": 7263.78,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 7238.456,
"text": " my gravity work but I started becoming interested in particle physics and quantum field theory so I started doing quantum field theory and by the way in the first year as a student there were about six or seven of us in the maths department what's called Bennett Street, Cambridge and"
},
{
"end_time": 7293.916,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 7264.957,
"text": " We had a room where we could meet, a big room. And so after a year, we were told to give a lecture. We had seminars every Thursday. And I had to give a seminar on my work, which was on quantum field theory, not gravity. And I worked on the axiomatics of quantum field theory and what's called Haag's theorem."
},
{
"end_time": 7322.227,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 7295.299,
"text": " developed by a German physicist called Hag, Rudolf Hag. Pally worked on this Hag theorem at the time, Wolfgang Pall. So I gave this lecture and it was fairly original work and I used a notation of Fried Fried"
},
{
"end_time": 7350.077,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7322.517,
"text": " Friedman, an American quantum field theorist at New York University published a book. So Dirac said to me, asked a question. He says, what are those round brackets? I said, this is what you call bras and kets, the triangular brackets. And he said, well, that's very interesting. He was fascinated by this."
},
{
"end_time": 7380.469,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7351.374,
"text": " Who invented this? Professor Friedman. Anyway, so three of them were failed. It was pretty brutal. There was no exam. We were just to give an lecture on original physics research. And if you didn't make it, you were out. He was sent down from Cambridge. And so I was one of the first to survive."
},
{
"end_time": 7410.964,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7381.186,
"text": " PhD in 1958. During the course of my work, I met Roy Kerr, the Kerr metric. He came in from New Zealand to be at Trinity College, where we became friends. And so he said, what should I do? I said, well, I said, what about physics? He was a brilliant mathematician. I said, well, do gravity, general relativity."
},
{
"end_time": 7438.302,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7411.51,
"text": " You don't have to worry too much about the physics at the moment, because generality was not that well developed at this point. We're talking about 1956-57. So even after Einstein died, general relativity wasn't completely developed? No. So the general relativity that we learn in university is the fully articulated form that Einstein didn't even put? Yeah, it was being developed, still being developed and so on at the time."
},
{
"end_time": 7465.947,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7439.019,
"text": " mathematically speaking. There was not enough experimental data, you see. It was not that cosmology was an infancy. During my work I read a paper by Einstein and Infel published in 1949 and Infel was a Polish physicist more so and I found a mistake. It was wrong, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 7495.691,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7466.596,
"text": " So I got hold of Roy and I said, have a look at this. I did the calculations and he looked at it and he said, yeah, you're right, it's wrong. So we wrote a paper together. We thought we should do something about this. And because there was a famous paper, there was a famous photograph of Einstein at the front of the front of the paper."
},
{
"end_time": 7523.234,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7496.305,
"text": " This was, it was the Canadian Journal of Mathematics that published the paper. And this photograph was by Kash, famous photographer called Kash. And anyway, so we wrote up this paper and sent it to Physical Review. It was reviewed by Peter Bergman, who was one of Einstein's assistants at one point."
},
{
"end_time": 7552.688,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7524.206,
"text": " He was one of the editors of Physical Review and he wrote back saying, we can't publish this paper because it besmarks the reputation of famous physicists of Einstein. So I got upset about it and I was angry about that. I was at the verge of leaving physics, I can't deal with this."
},
{
"end_time": 7581.681,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7553.797,
"text": " So because you have responsibility for posterity, younger physicists who can use this work. So I got my PhD. They were not happy about it. I put this, I started working on it to collect it, okay, and wrote a paper and I put it into my PhD thesis."
},
{
"end_time": 7611.834,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7582.125,
"text": " And my examiners were not entirely happy about this. But there wasn't anything they could do about it. So I then eventually I got my PhD without an undergraduate degree. By the way, I was, I think the one at that time, maybe still the only student at Trinity to get a PhD without an undergraduate degree."
},
{
"end_time": 7642.483,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7612.79,
"text": " I think in theoretical physics anyway that I know of. Maybe that's still true, I don't know. But um, so it's fairly unique. The exiles weren't happy about that either, of course, because they had this guinea pig, okay, so to speak, who was going through the system in Cambridge. Is it possible to do this? Okay, well, I did it."
},
{
"end_time": 7673.643,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7643.831,
"text": " So then I got a fellowship from the same department in Dutch, Scientific and Dutch Research, who originally got me to England, to a two-year fellowship. So I went to Imperial College. In the meantime, Abdus Salam was my professor at Imperial College London. And here I was, I was put in an office next to his office. I was his first post-doctoral fellow."
},
{
"end_time": 7703.831,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7674.701,
"text": " and started working in particle physics and field theory. But I was worrying about getting a job. At this point I was married and so I got hold of John Wheeler and he suggested I apply for a job at the Institute for Research in Baltimore, Maryland."
},
{
"end_time": 7731.135,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7704.258,
"text": " which I did. They offered me a job so I went there in 1959 and was at this institute. I was a senior researcher there. I was doing particle physics and field theory. They also had a math department and Solomon Lifshitz was the director of the famous Maths Institute there and"
},
{
"end_time": 7756.664,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7733.183,
"text": " Then quickly I published papers in particle physics, published a lot of papers rapidly at physics, particle physics. Then I was offered a job at the University of Toronto as an associate professor already."
},
{
"end_time": 7787.193,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7757.824,
"text": " with the promise of being a full professor within a couple of years, which again is very unusual. And I got a job there. I had to do teaching, full-time teaching. So I started teaching undergraduate courses and I never attended undergraduate courses. But I did okay. And graduate courses and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 7810.947,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7789.087,
"text": " That's it. Do you know who Ryan Keating is? He's an experimental physicist. Yeah, I read his book, How to Lose the Nobel Prize. Quite an amusing, entertaining book."
}
]
}No transcript available.