And that that is really the founding crime.
For me in the string revolution,
it was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us is an idiot.
The point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it may
be an academic level outside of traditional channels.
And it has to do in part with my belief that we don't really understand how much
idea suppression has been going on for a very long period of time within the
standard institutions. In fact, I've,
I've created this thing I've called the disk,
the distributed idea suppression complex and its purpose is to make sure that
ideas do not suddenly catch fire and append and disrupt previous structures.
So for example, I would claim that string theory,
which is absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what, 1984.
Yeah. Since about then, this is about 35 years.
It artificially consolidated the field around a complex of ideas that did not
have a huge signal coming from experiment you know,
to, to, to try to steal home base.
I mean to understand that you have to understand the a as I'm sure you do,
the the culture of particle physics at the time when string theory started to
grow, which is you know, up until you know,
up through the 70s there had been steady experimental results coming in from
particle accelerators where it was like a new particle every week that there is
rafting to really cooperate on as a community to jump in and try to figure it
out and exchange ideas very more of the fifties and sixties it was,
but it continued all the way through the 70s and,
and from that culture of, you know,
community working together on, on information that's coming in a steady stream,
right? You got this culture of like, yeah, no, don't go do that.
I think it's a waste of time. You really want to be working on what's hot,
right?
Cause there's new information coming in all the time and this is where the
culture of strength there, he started, I was also more involved in the,
in the culture of general relativity and gravityK ,
which is a very different culture. It's a much more slow paced.
You don't have any results coming in all the time. Everything's very,
is much more do I set this up a little bit for our audience and you should
critique if I do a poor job, in essence,
the two great idea, complexes in fundamental physics,
not condensed matter physics or astrophysics,
but like whatever ground reality physics is is the general relativistic complex
around the ideas of Einstein.
And then there's the sort of quantum field theoretic complex or the quantum
complex around the ideas of bores, sort of fair enough. And plonk RNA.
I don't mean to slight Dirac and others, but just to keep it simple.
The children of Einstein and the children of BOR, right. And the, the,
the boring people went into particle physics. The boring people. Well,
you said they're the children of bores [inaudible] yeah. Okay. So, so there,
so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire, you know, moving,
moving things along as part of the community. Whereas John relativity,
the people from the Einstein community were more exploring different
possibilities at their own pace.
And there is more of an exploratory culture and that's a culture that turned
into loop quantum gravity. So, so first of all, I'm just gonna art.
I'm going to begin arguing with you there to me. Yeah. The issue was,
is that Einstein put much more of a,
the general relativistic picture in place.
So there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and because the quantum
was considerably less tied up there was much more work.
And so through a system of selective pressures,
the more successful community in some sense left fewer descendants and they were
less capable because there was less for them to do.
And then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains
because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between
theory and experiment. That's right. Okay. And, and,
but what happened was that
when the, when you think about it as a whole,
that gravity has to be quantized. So there,
there are two ways of getting there.
You can either start from bores children and,
and quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that
encompasses gravity.
Or you can start from the gravitational side and geometry and try to somehow get
quantum mechanics to play nice with this essentially classical geometric theory.
And they were two very different approaches and two very different cultures.
I still have some disagreements,
but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us. So,
all right, so, so anyway, my, my, the point I started with was that the,
the strength theory came out of the particle physics community.
We say string theory,
we mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original
string revolution of let's say Vanette Siana, which was much earlier. Okay.
So that in, in the mid 1980s,
there was a discovery called the anomaly cancellation where two very improbable
things canceled each other.
And the theory was suddenly there was a theory that was given a green light that
was highly restrictive as to what could, what could go in that spot.
And that result,
the anomaly cancellation gave birth to a cultural phenomenon,
which was sort of takeover of theoretical physics by string, right?
I mean it looks so promising at the time in the 80s.
I mean they thought that yes,
it naturally encompasses gravity and all we need to do is find the right you
know,
high dimensional manifold to attach to for our strings to vibrate in and we'll
immediately recover all the properties of the particles of the standard model.
We just have to find the right one. We'll probably get this done by lunchtime.
We wrapped up, I don't believe that story. Yeah, well they, it didn't happen.
That was even what actually happened in I,
I wasn't college during this period.
And even though that's the story that I would agree is told inside of the
community, I'm not sure that I fully believe it.
If I go back to my own memories, something very different happened. Well,
it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon.
I think something's still different happened.
I think that ed Witten showed up and that there was one human being,
he's his own anomaly. He was in, he was absolutely an anomaly.
He came to Penn in, I don't know whether it was 83 or 84
I left in 85 and he started talking about what the world was in a way that none
of the physicists could actually follow because he was using ideas from,
from differential geometry and from high higher mathematics in ways that most of
the community couldn't track. He was saying things like,
the reason we have three copies of the kind of matter that makes up our world
comes from the
characteristic numbers of a six dimensional complex manifold found at every
point in space and time. And these things were so mindblowing. I mean, if the,
if our listeners can't exactly follow it,
they were in the same shoes as many people in the community.
There was a voice that was clearly coming from another planet. Right.
undoubtedly the most brilliant person I've ever met in my life.
The one person who continues to make me tremble when I hear his name or his
voice and this person signed on big time to string theory in a way that was very
course of in seductive so that even though the community understood why he was
signing on,
it was in part Witten's endorsement that really started to move the needle in my
head. My opinion. Yeah. And it's,
it's it's stunning just to what degree that failed.
Okay. So say more or the the strength or unification program.
The idea that this description of all fundamental particles and gravity and our
entire universe would come from a model based on strings vibrating and other
higher dimensions. I mean that this unification program has failed.
The vast majority of the high energy physics community has been working on it
for over 30 years and they've utterly failed to deliver on that promise despite
the hype, high hopes and promises. Well, and this has to,
and again, we can sort of do a small synopsis of the field.
The idea was the original hopes had been built around an idealized point
particle concept where hard little balls were kind of the naive model of
particles. Then you had to smear them out and do waves on waves.
From that point,
particle concept called second quantization or quantum field theory and string
theory said no,
the fundamental unit should never have been a hard little ball to begin with.
It should have been modeled by something that was an as if string obviously,
and it wasn't string made out of atoms.
It was some sort of mathematical version of abstract mathematical description of
a, of a surface inside a, another surface essentially. Right. And so this,
this thing had a peculiar appeal to the children of bore that was not that
appealing to the children of Einstein. Would that be a fair description of it?
That it has for pretty subtle reasons,
specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what appeared
to be a particle excitations within from the string model right now,
that thing that sudden shift in the community from regular quantum field theory,
from a plurality of different approaches,
whether some of them had names like Technicolor or grand unification or
supersymmetry. All of this seemed to get subsumed in this I dunno,
a fad what, what it's hard to click it giant rolling.
What kind of Marie de Marcy ball where it's just collecting everything that it
touches and making it a part of itself. That's right. And in fact,
the claim was if we find something that isn't string theory,
we'll just find some way of including it and call it string theory.
So this was a bizarre, you know, there was, it was a sociological phenomena.
It was a we,
we would say the political economy of science was involved where,
who could get a job for their students,
whether or not the newspapers were going to challenge this or go along with it.
So you had reporters who had no idea what was going on,
publishing these glowing pieces about the string theorists and how they were
going to wrap it all up. Yep. And in essence you know,
we have this concept in evolutionary theory called interference competition
where one animal will attempt to outcompete the other by keeping it away from
like a watering hole.
So nobody else could afford to get nourished because the string theorists were
saying all the smart people are in string theory.
It's the only game in town was the famous phrase.
I certainly encountered a lack of nourishment when I graduated in the 90s,
and I wasn't interested in strings, but I was interested in high energy physics.
Why? I think almost everybody was in that position and that that is really the
founding crime. For me in the string revolution,
it was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us as an idiot.
Yeah. That's above and normal physicist
Arrogance.