Peter Woit: Unification, Twistors, and the Death of String Theory
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 6 December 2023
⏱️ 185 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | You cannot play any games about this. You have to admit that this is wrong. I think especially |
| 0:03.7 | for mathematicians to come in and see an environment where there's guiding ideas that people |
| 0:08.6 | haven't really worked out and a lot of things are known, do not work for known reasons. But people |
| 0:13.0 | are still acting as if this is not true and trying to figure out how to do something and make |
| 0:17.1 | career for themselves. Peter Waite is a theoretical physicist and a mathematician at Columbia University. |
| 0:24.6 | He's been an influential figure in the ongoing debate surrounding string theory. |
| 0:28.6 | His critiques, as articulated in his book, Not Even Wrong, |
| 0:31.6 | strike at the heart of many popular assertions about this framework. |
| 0:35.6 | Professor Woit also has a widely read blog in the math and physics physics scene called Not Even Wrong, so it's the same name. |
| 0:41.3 | And the links to all resources everything mentioned will be in the description as usual. |
| 0:45.3 | We take meticulous time stamps and we take meticulous show notes. |
| 0:48.3 | In one sense, the problem with string theory is the opposite of the problem of fossil fuels. |
| 0:52.3 | With fossil fuel companies, you have a goal, |
| 0:54.4 | let's say it's to wash your clothes, and you're able to achieve that goal, but you produce |
| 0:57.8 | negative externalities, whereas string theory has plenty of positive externalities, but arguably |
| 1:02.7 | achieves little toward its initial goal. Professor White introduces a novel tow approach, |
| 1:07.6 | called Euclidean Twister unification, you may recognize that term twister, as |
| 1:11.6 | it's primarily associated with Roger Penrose. Twisters provide an alternative to space-time |
| 1:16.1 | descriptions in quantum physics. Peter's application of Twisters is in the Euclidean setting, |
| 1:20.7 | and he talks about how this significantly changes the playing field. It opens up a connection |
| 1:24.7 | between gravity and the weak interaction, because spacetime in this formulation is inherently Cairo. |
| 1:30.3 | We also talk about spinners and Michael Atiyah. You know how some people are Christian mystics or Muslim mystics? |
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