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Eric Weinstein is a mathematician with a bold and piercing intelligence, unafraid to explore the biggest questions in the universe and shine a light on the darkest corners of our society. He is the host of The Portal podcast, a part of which, he recently released his 2013 Oxford lecture on his theory of Geometric Unity that is at the center of his lifelong efforts in arriving at a theory of everything that unifies the fundamental laws of physics.

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You recently published the video of a lecture you gave at Oxford presenting some aspects of a theory, a theory of everything called geometric unity.

Excited, scared, the experience of posting it.

You know, it's funny, 1 of the things that you learn to feel as an academic is the great sins you can commit in academics is to show yourself to be a non-serious person, to show yourself to have delusions, to avoid the standard practices, which everyone has signed up for.

And it's weird because you know that those people are gonna be angry.

And what we're referring to, for example, there's traditions of sort of publishing incrementally, certainly not trying to have a theory of everything, perhaps working within the academic departments, All those things.

And so you're going outside of all of that.

Well, I mean, I was going inside of all of that.

And we did not come to terms when I was inside.

And what they did was so outside to me, was so weird, so freakish.

Like the most senior respectable people at the most senior respectable places were functionally insane as far as I could tell.

And again, it's like being functionally stupid if you're the head of the CDC or something, where you're giving recommendations out that aren't based on what you actually believe, they're based on what you think you have to be doing.

Well, in some sense, I think that that's a lot of how I saw the math and physics world, as the physics world was really crazy, and the math world was considerably less crazy, just very strict and kind of dogmatic.

Well, we'll psychoanalyze those folks, but I really wanna maybe linger on it a little bit longer of how you feel because this is such a special moment in your life.

So if we can pair off some of those other issues.

It's new being able to say what the observer's is, which is my attempt to replace space time with something that is both closely related to space time and not space time.

So I used to carry the number 14 as a closely guarded secret in my life.

And where 14 is really 4 dimensions of space and time plus 10 extra dimensions of rulers and protractors or for the cool kids out there, symmetric 2 tensors.

So you had a geometric, complicated, beautiful geometric view of the world that you carried with you for a long time.

Did you have friends that you, colleagues that

No, in fact, part of some of these stories are me coming out to my friends.

And I use the phrase coming out because I think that gays have monopolized the concept of a closet.

Many of us are in closets having nothing to do with our sexual orientation.

Yeah, I didn't really feel comfortable talking to almost anyone.

And I think that I let on in some ways that I was up to something and probably, but it was a very weird life.

So I had to have a series of things that I pretended to care about so that I could use that as the stalking horse for what I really cared about.

And to your point, I never understood this whole thing about theories of everything.

Like if you were gonna go into something like theoretical physics, isn't that what you would normally pursue?

Like wouldn't it be crazy to do something that difficult and that poorly paid if you were gonna try to do something other than figure out what this is all about?

Now I have to reveal my cards, my sort of weaknesses and lack and understanding of the music of physics and math departments, but there's an analogy here to artificial intelligence.

And often folks come in and say, okay, so there's a giant department working on quote unquote artificial intelligence, but why is nobody actually working on intelligence?

Like you're all just building little toys.

You're not actually trying to understand.

It confuses them, because like, okay, so I'm at MIT, I'm at Stanford, I'm at Harvard, I'm here, I dreamed of being, working on artificial intelligence.

Why is everybody not actually working on intelligence?

And I have the same kind of sense that that's what working on the theory of everything is.

That strangely you somehow become an outcast for even.

Well, it's because, let's take the artificial, let's play with AGI, for example.

I think that the idea starts off with nobody really knows how to work on that.

And so if we don't know how to work on it, we choose instead to work on a program that is tangentially related to it.

So we do a component of a program that is related to that big question because it's felt like at least I can make progress there.

Where I was in, it's funny, there was this book called Frieden Uhlenbeck and it had this weird mysterious line in the beginning of it.

And I tried to get clarification of this weird mysterious line and everyone said wrong things.

And then I said, okay, well, so I can tell that nobody's thinking properly because I just asked the entire department and nobody has a correct interpretation of this.

And so, it's a little bit like you see a crime scene photo and you have a different idea, Like there's a smoking gun and you figure, that's actually a cigarette lighter, I don't really believe that.

And then there's like a pack of cards and you think, oh, that looks like the blunt instrument that the person was beaten with.

You know, so you have a very different idea about how things go.

And very quickly you realize that there's no 1 thinking about that.

There's a few human sides to this and technical sides, both of which I'd love to try to get down to.

So the human side, I can tell from my perspective, I think it was before April 1st, April fools, maybe the day before, I forget, but I was laying in bed in the middle of the night and somehow it popped up, you know, on my feed somewhere that your beautiful face is speaking live and I clicked and you know, it's kind of weird how the universe just brings things together in this kind of way.

And all of a sudden I realized that there's something big happening at this particular moment.

It's strange, on a day like any day, and all of a sudden you were thinking of, you had this somber tone, like you were serious, like you were going through some difficult decision.

And it seems strange, I almost thought you were maybe joking, but there was a serious decision being made and it was a wonderful experience to go through with you.

And so I want to ask, I mean, thank you for letting me be part of that kind of journey of decision-making that took 30 years, but Why now?

Why did you think, why did you struggle so long not to release it and decide to release it now?

While the whole world is on lockdown, on April fools, is it just because you like the comedy of absurd ways that the universe comes together?

I think that the COVID epidemic is the end of the big nap.

And I think that I actually tried this 7 years earlier in Oxford.

Because your platform is quite different now, actually.

The internet, I remember you, I read several of your brilliant answers that people should read for the Edge questions.

was 10 years ago, and that's exactly what I did is I decamped to the internet, which is where the portal lives.

Well, we'll insert the whole, the theme, that's right, the ominous theme music, which you just listen to forever.

I actually started recording tiny guitar licks for the audio portion, not for the video portion.

You kind of inspire me with bringing your guitar into the story, but keep going.

So you thought, so the Oxford was like step 1, and you kind of, you put your foot into the water to sample it, but it was too cold at the time, so you didn't want to step in all the- I

What was disappointing about that experience?

It has to do with the fact that, and I can see this mirrors a disappointment within myself.

1 is the issue of making sure that the idea is actually heard and explored.

And the other is the question about, will I become disconnected from my work because it will be ridiculed, it will be immediately improved, it will be found to be derivative of something that occurred in some paper in 1957.

When the community does not want you to gain a voice.

It's a little bit like a policeman deciding to weirdly in enforce all of these little known regulations against you and you know, sometimes nobody else.

And I think that's kind of, you know, this weird thing where I just don't believe that we can reach the final theory necessarily within the political economy of academics.

So if you think about how academics are tortured by each other and how they're paid and where they have freedom and where they don't, I actually weirdly think that that system of selective pressures is going to eliminate anybody who's going to make real progress.

So if you look at the story of Andrew Wiles, for example, with the Fermat's last theorem, I mean, he, as far as I understand, he pretty much isolated himself from the world of academics in terms of the big, the bulk of the work he did.

And from my perspective, it's dramatic and fun to read about but it seemed exceptionally stressful the first steps he took when actually making the work public and that seemed to me it would be hell.

Yeah, but it's like so artificially dramatic.

You know, he leads up to it at a series of lectures.

And then he finally says it at the end, because obviously this comes out of a body of work where, I mean, the funny part about Fermat's last theorem is it wasn't originally thought to be a deep and meaningful problem.

It was just an easy to state 1 that had gone unsolved.

But if you think about it, it became attached to the body of regular theory.

So he built up this body of regular theory, gets all the way up to the end, announces.

And then there's this whole drama about, okay, somebody's checking the proof.

I don't understand what's going on in line 37.

Seems a little bit more serious than we knew.

Do you share the concern that your experience might be something similar?

Well, in his case, I think that if I recall correctly, his original proof was unsalvageable.

He actually came up with a second proof with a colleague, Richard Taylor, and it was that second proof which carried the day.

So it was a little bit that he got put under incredible pressure, and then had to succeed in a new way, having failed the first time, which is like even a weirder and stranger story.

That's an incredible story in some sense.

But I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of the kind of stress you're under.

What I don't think people understand with me is the scale of the critique.

It's like, I don't, people say, well, you must implicitly agree with this and implicitly agree, and it's like, no, try me.

Ask before you decide that I am mostly in agreement with the community about how these things should be handled or what these things mean.

And also, just why does criticism matter so much here?

So you seem to dislike the burden of criticism that it will choke away all.

There's constructive criticism and there's destructive criticism.

And what I don't like is I don't like a community that can't, first of all, like if you take the physics community, just the way we screwed up on masks and PPE, just the way we screwed up in the financial crisis and mortgage backed securities, we screwed up on string theory.

Can we just forget the string theory happened or

But then somebody should say that, right?

Somebody should say, you know, it didn't work out.

But okay, but you're asking this, like why do you guys get to keep the prestige after failing for 35 years?

Whoever the, look, these things, if there is a theory of everything to be had, right?

It's going to be a relatively small group of people where this will be sorted out.

It's not tens of thousands, it's probably hundreds at the top.

There's the, I mean, you always in this world have people who are kind, open-minded.

about kind, it's a question about, okay, let's imagine, for example, that you have a story where you believe that ulcers are definitely caused by stress.

And you've never questioned it, Or maybe you felt like the Japanese came out of the blue and attacked us at Pearl Harbor.

Right, and now somebody introduces a new idea to you, which is like, what if it isn't stress at all?

Or what if we actually tried to make resource starved Japan attack us somewhere in the Pacific so we could have Cassius Belli to enter the Asian theater.

And the person's original idea is like, what, what are you even saying?

Well, when Dirac in 1963 talked about the importance of beauty as a guiding principle in physics.

And he wasn't talking about the scientific method.

But he was actually making a great point.

He was using Schrodinger, and I think Schrodinger was standing in for him.

And he said that if your equations don't agree with experiment, that's kind of a minor detail.

If they have true beauty in them, you should explore them because very often the agreement with experiment is an issue of fine tuning of your model, of the instantiation.

And so it doesn't really tell you that your model is wrong.

And of course, Heisenberg told Dirac that his model was wrong because the proton and the electron should be the same mass if they are each other's antiparticles.

And that was an irrelevant kind of silliness rather than a real threat to the Dirac theory.

But okay, so amidst all this silliness, I'm hoping that we could talk about the journey that Geometric Unity has taken and will take as an idea, and an idea that will see the light.

That, so first of all, let's, I'm thinking of writing a book called Geometric Unity for Idiots.

all, I hope I have the trademark on geometric unity.

of the goals of geometric unity, the basic tools of mathematics, use the viewpoints in general for idiots like me.

The goal of geometric unity is to start with something so completely bland that you can simply say, well, that's a something that begins the game is as close to a mathematical nothing as possible.

In other words, I can't answer the question.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

But if there has to be a something that we begin from, let it begin from something that's like a blank canvas.

Let's even more basic, so what is something?

Okay, right now we have a model of our world And it's got 2 sectors.

1 of the sectors is called general relativity, the other is called the standard model.

So we'll call it GR for general relativity and SM for standard model.

So general relativity gives pride of place to gravity and everything else is acting as a sort of a backup singer.

Gravity is the star of general relativity.

And in the standard model, the other 3 non-gravitational forces, so if there are 4 forces that we know about, 3 of the 4 are non-gravitational, that's where they get to shine.

Great, so tiny little particles and how they interact with

So photons, gluons, and so-called intermediate vector bosons.

Those are the things that the standard model showcases and general relativity showcases gravity.

And then you have matter, which is accommodated in both theories, but much more beautifully inside of the standard model.

So what, what is the theory of everything do?

So, so first of all, I think that that's, that's, that's the first place where we haven't talked enough.

We assume that we know what it means, but we don't actually have any idea what it means.

And what I claim it is, is that it's a theory where the questions beyond that theory are no longer of a mathematical nature.

In other words, if I say, let us take X to be a four-dimensional manifold, to a mathematician or a physicist, I've said very little.

I've simply said there's some place for calculus and linear algebra to dance together and to play.

They're the most natural place where our 2 greatest math theories can really intertwine.

So it's sort of like saying I'm an artist and I want to order a canvas.

Now the question is, does the canvas paint itself?

Does the canvas come up with an artist and paint in ink, which then paint the canvas?

Like that's the hard part about theories of everything, which I don't think people talk enough about.

Can we just, you bring up Escher and the hand that draws itself.

The fire that lights itself or drawing hands.

And every time I start to think about that, my mind shuts down.

No, it's beautiful, but this robot's brain sparks fly.

So can we try to say the same thing over and over in different ways about what you mean by that having to be a thing we have to contend with?

Like why do you think that creating a theory of everything, as you call the source code, our understanding our source code, require a view like the hand that draws itself?

here's what goes on in the regular physics picture.

We've got these 2 main theories, general relativity and the standard model, right?

Think of general relativity as more or less the theory of the canvas, okay?

Maybe you have the canvas in a particularly rigid shape, maybe you've measured it so it's got length and it's got an angle, but more or less it's just canvas and length and angle and that's all that really general relativity is, but it allows the canvas to warp a bit.

Then we have the second thing, which is this import of foreign libraries, which aren't tied to space and time.

So we've got this crazy set of symmetries called SU3 cross SU2 cross U1.

We've got this collection of 16 particles in a generation, which are these sort of twisted spinners.

Then we've got this weird Higgs field that comes in and like Deus Ex Machina solves all the problems that have been created in the play that can't be resolved otherwise.

So that's the standard model of quantum field theory just plopped on top

It's a problem of the double origin story.

The other origin story is about what we would call internal quantum numbers and internal symmetries.

And then there was an attempt to get 1 to follow from the other called the Kaluza-Klein theory, which didn't work out.

So you said origin story, so in the hand that draws itself, what is it?

So it's as if you had the canvas, and then you ordered up, also give me paint brushes, paints, pigments, pencils and artists.

But you're saying that's, like if you wanna create a universe from scratch, the canvas should be generating the paintbrushes and the paintbrushes should be generating the canvas.

then we're gonna get into a religious thing and I don't wanna do that.

Well, you know my shtick, which is that we are the AI.

We have 2 great stories about the simulation and artificial general intelligence.

In 1 story, man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self-aware, smarter than us, and will take over.

In Another story, there are genius simulators and we live in their simulation.

And we haven't realized that those 2 stories are the same story.

And if you buy those and you put them together, we are the AGI and whether or not we have simulators, we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.

So this could be our Skynet moment, which is 1 of the reasons I have some issues around it.

I think we'll talk about that, because I.

Well that's the issue of the emergent artist within the story, just to get back to the point.

Okay, so now the key point is, the standard way we tell the story is that Einstein sets the canvas, And then we order all the stuff that we want.

And then that paints the picture that is our universe.

So you order the paint, you order the artist, you order the brushes, and That then, when you collide the 2, gives you 2 separate origin stories.

The canvas came from 1 place and everything else came from somewhere else.

So what are the mathematical tools required to construct consistent geometric theory,

Well, somehow, you need to get 3 copies, for example, of generations with 16 particles each, right?

And so the question would be like, well, there's a lot of special personality in those symmetries.

So for example, you've got what would be called grand unified theories that sound like SU5, the George I.

There's something that should be called spin 10, but physicists insist on calling it SO10.

There's something called the Petit-Salam theory that tends to be called SU 4 cross SU 2 cross SU 2, which should be called spin 6 cross spin 4.

They're all taking the known forces that we see and packaging them up to say we can't get rid of the second origin story, but we can at least make that origin story more unified.

So they're trying grand unification as the attempt

to- And that's a mistake in your- It's not

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Geometric Unity - A Theory of Everything (Eric Weinstein) | AI Podcast Clips