We did it but we didn’t actually do the thing we needed to do so we may have even been better off had the nearest closest planet been two light years away so Mars didn’t exist correct and assume that Elon was still the Visionary that we want him to be
And he didn’t have a chemical rocket company I’d like to think that he would be focused on physics I would like to think that any of these people would be focused on physics take anybody with 11 figures what is your allocation to building a life raft to get humans out of here
You don’t you haven’t even thought about it immediately you’re going to think technology well what kind of a hole would I need it’s like no you need a Blackboard you need blackboards and physicists who are not afraid to do physics right now we are destroying the fundamental
Physics community at a rate that you could not believe what’s happening give me the gossip from inside for 39 years we have been dominated by one community’s Madness and that Community is called quantum gravity String Theory or M Theory it changed what we were researching it’s it’s cardinal sin is not about String
Theory it’s not about quantum gravity it changed the questions that met defined what it meant to be a fundamental physicist so if I say to you how many generations of matter are there I don’t know you don’t know that it’s three because we don’t talk about that all the time anymore
Or if I say do you know why why is matter chiral you wouldn’t know about that or if I said what’s the nature of the cortic potential for the Higgs field or why is there a yukawa coupling in one case in a minimal coupling somewhere else all of the real physics questions
That would cause progress got subtly replaced between 1984 and like 1987. and then we had questions like how do we quantize gravity and that became this oh that is the ultimate question well it’s it’s not that’s that’s just wrong this comes out of Bryce DeWitt this comes out of a guy
Who in 1952 went with his wife to the Tata Institute of fundamental research in Bombay then wrote an essay for something called the Gravity Research Foundation that was about anti-gravity and they he was supposed to write an essay and then he said well to get anti-gravity what you’d really need to
Do is to do quantum gravity and for 70 years we’ve been trying to do quantum gravity and it’s an abject failure and the physicists at the at the helm changed the questions the official questions should sound something like this why are there three generations of matter why is it flavor chiral what is
The nature in the origin of the Higgs mechanism why are we in one comma three dimensions and what is with su3 cross su2 cross U1 which is a bunch of symmetries and why does it seem to represent on a 16 dimensional space with the observed quantum numbers that may not mean a lot
To you but I guarantee you if they’re a physicists in the audience they’re getting pissed off right now because they allowed their their subject to be dragged away from our real questions for reasons that are unclear and put in the service of these questions that can’t be
Answered and we can’t even question them 39 years into this complete train wreck that is the community that could build the life raft what is so seductive about Quantum everything quantum gravity yeah it allows for toy problems so that you can not do your work on the world that we have and you
Can say well the world that we have is too complicated so I created this fake world over here that’s not in four dimensions it’s in two Dimensions it’s not in laurencian signature it’s in euclidean signature it’s not the full gauge group uh it’s just su2 and I’ve
Changed all the parameters and then I say and I’ve made some minor incremental progress in that fake world and then everybody claps and meanwhile 10 years later you don’t even remember what the particles are that are present in the universe you don’t even remember the the standard model of particle
Theory and this is a very real effect today’s physicists a lot of the young ones are completely ignorant about the physical world they could not find the men’s or women’s room at CERN uh if they’re life depended on them yeah so it seems like a hijacking of attention and focus from difficult problems
To from useful difficult problems to useless or less useful easier problems but if you try to talk about the real problems you can’t get engagement and they will say it is well maybe people just aren’t interested in your ideas I was like yeah but you’re
Not listening to so far as I can tell everybody who comes from outside with an interesting new idea isn’t being listened to it’s not personal and we also have a responsibility this is like it’s a really crazy part we doomed Humanity like Francis Crick who was a co-discover of the
Three-dimensional structure of DNA was a physicist Edward Teller was a physicist stanislav ulam was a geometer we doomed Humanity on Earth and then we’re treating science as if oh it’s a series of puzzles well what do you want to work on today well I don’t want to be arrogant I’ll
Just work on this tiny little problem and I’m just thinking like do do you not feel any basic responsibility after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and kovid all right just how crazy are you is that you know we’ve spoken about the interplanetary challenge right and the fact that physics needs to make some progress in
Order to facilitate that if we’re going to do it yeah is in your opinion forgetting the fact that chemical Rockets right limitations all that sort of stuff is going into planetary as useful is it the highest priority the highest priority you’ll you cannot stabilize this place just imagine every communalist dream came true
We turned away from fossil fuels towards a the greenest New Deal you could possibly imagine all billionaires realize the errors of their ways and contributed their money to bring up the poorest of the poor AI was as beneficial as it could be and only helped Humanity to live its Street just go full
Wild Pollyanna optimism you still can’t stabilize it why um too many people say more not for long population rates both rights at the moment we’re talking at totally different scales I’m telling you that with crispr cas9 with the teller ulam design ivg ivg you know ivg IVF but being able to use
From any other sure yep uh so I was trying to I was trying to think uh in a different context you are going to have um people what happens when you distribute the coronavirus because everybody’s had it you’ve had it I got an antibody test and I had it but
Never failed it okay yeah so you have this this pla platform this virus viral platform that’s spread all over the world and you have the ability to edit it are you telling me that people aren’t going to figure out how to come up with fun viruses and gain a function projects
And people are going to be able to do these uh you know polymerase Chain Reaction I think was taught in my daughter’s High School are you familiar with uh Nick bostrom’s Bulls from the urn analogy yeah vaguely yeah so for the people that don’t know
You can imagine that you you have an urn and each time that you make technological progress you pick a ball out and you don’t know what color some are white perfectly good yep so I’m a gray bit a good bit of bad and some are
All the way down to black and black is permanent unrecoverable collapse right and the unrecoverable bit is important no and each time we just keep picking out balls so my take on it is there’s already too much level too much leverage too little wisdom too many
People was that you once said uh we are Gods but for the wisdom we’re just shitty gods I don’t know if it’s the second part but um you know I I guess when I heard the story about this kid who scavenged the americium from all of these smoke
Detectors in Brooklyn and built a self-sustaining nuclear reactor from these tiny little radioactive strips you don’t know what people’s creativity is you know I found it fascinating when I was growing up that I was the only kid who knew that gunpowder or black powder was 75 potassium nitrate
10 sulfur and 15 carbon like you could just make it you know and you know that’s the recipe and that that just blew my mind that the rate limiting step was that people didn’t know that potassium nitrate was saltpeter or where to get it like meat tender but
Mostly we’re saved from the stuff because nobody’s so sociopathic and competent that they go for these high leverage attacks that’s going to end you know that was like what happened on 9 11. I always wanted to know why were little kids allowed to go into the
Cockpit of a plane you used to be able to meet the pilot I remember meeting them I remember doing it yeah so that’s where we are now is is that we’ve got all this High leverage stuff and you’re going to see nuclear proliferation eventually you’re going to get some
Desperate backed into a corner who says well this is my only move well I mean for the nuclear concernists out there at least what I know wouldn’t that be all of us everybody is concerned but for the people that are nuclear war is a genuine X risk permanent and recoverable
Collapse you can set them all off unless there’s like 10 to 100 times more than we think that we have which there very well could be um it seems difficult for it to be permanent unrecoverable collapse for me as a true true true extras may I say something yeah this is ridiculous
It’s bad enough that it would completely transform Life as we know it you’d agree that absolutely absolutely it’s time it’s time to get serious about things we can actually do and the most interesting thing is that nobody’s interested in interplanetary physics I I just I’ve never seen anything like it
Interplanetary physics would be physics in service of us becoming interplanetary or is there something specific about the way the planets figure together no no it’s it’s about but let me give you an analogy that’s more than an analogy assume that somebody hands you a physical paper map an enormous one okay
And you’re trying to navigate it on this table that we’re we have here you’re starting to do Motions like this where you’re moving the paper across the table you know to get from Los Angeles to Fresno California if it’s at the right scale and it might take you a long
Time to do that okay but now you have somebody trained on an iPad what are they going to do well they might do that but that’s not the key thing they’re going to do they’re going to do what is called multi multi-touch gestures and the one that you’re thinking of
Should be pinched to zoom so the most natural way to do this is to treat it not as if it’s a paper map but a stack of paper maps and you want to go to the one with a different scale if if you were doing this on an iPad that was
Mirroring this the key point is is that the paper map doesn’t have an extra Dimension to play with but the pinch to zoom dimension is a scale Dimension so imagine what you did instead was you looked at your house you pinch to zoom out you then do this motion or whatever it
Is to get to your friend’s house and then when you land there you expand it again imagine that you only know about paper maps but your adversary has an iPad that’s what I’m worried about we’re not looking for pinch to zoom what would that be in this
Um well I claim that there are going to be 10 extra coordinates and four of them uh are pinched to zoom and six of them are what I would call um Shear to tilt so imagine that you have a copy of a picture of of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on your iPad
You should be able to do something in paint which changes the angle right so if you go into Ms paint there’s this little thing that allows you to change by a particular but you could do that as a gesture where so my claim is if you have four
Dimensions of time and X Y and Z of space you have pinched to zoom on all of all four of those and then for any two Dimensions like x and z you have Shear to tilt so the first are the four rulers and the next are the six protractors and that’s
Something called a symmetric two tensor or a metric which Einstein knew all about but he only chose one through his equations and he let all the other ones lie Fallout and my claim is I don’t think that’s where we are I think that interplanetary physics is going to
Involve moving from what we called space time to something called The Observers which contains pinch to zoom and Shear to tilt and you want to get off this planet you’re not going to get there using general relativity and you’re not going to get there using the standard model
It’s time to take your pacifier out of your mouth and go back to doing real physics I think if we were serious about this we would be struggling with the physics of the world in which we live not toy models we’d be taking massive risks and listening to people from various
Perspectives who haven’t failed or have not been invited to fully explain their ideas and we’d be looking for things that would be new new variables new ways of working with the world that allowed us to do things that would previously considered inconceivable so if you if you look at
1911 which is when I think Rutherford first starts talking about the neutron as a hypothesis it’s 41 years later we have the hydrogen bomb we can do incredible things that are not possible yet because we don’t know the framework and my claim is if you imagine somebody used to paper
Maps being put on an iPad and not knowing about multi-touch gestures that is pretty much an exact analogy of what happens when you do too much general relativity is that you start to think in general relativistic terms as if that’s the last word Einstein would never have put up with
That we’ll get back to talking to Eric in one minute but first I need to tell you about cozyoth look we spend one third of Our Lives asleep you do not want to spend 33 percent of your existence inside of sheets that do not make you feel amazing cozy Earth has the
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