Refuting Eric Weinstein's and Stephen Wolfram's Theories of Everything | Scott Aaronson & Tim Nguyen

Computer scientist Scott Aaronson and mathematician and AI researcher Timothy Nguyen discuss Eric Weinstein's and Stephen Wolfram's recent proposals at a "Theory of Everything".
#theoryofeverything #quantumphysics #physics #mathematics #ericweinstein #wolfram #quantum
Patreon: / timothynguyen
00:05 : What Aaronson and Nguyen have in common
01:08 : Aaronson: "I've met Eric Weinstein"
02:16 : Aaronson's review of Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"
05:26 : Bell's inequality and entanglement
09:56 : "Free Will Theorem"
11:08 : quantum randomness, Ethereum, and proof of stake
13:13 : a phone call from Stephen Wolfram
15:28 : Aaronson on the response paper to Eric Weinstein's "Geometric Unity"
16:25 : Brian Keating and experimental tests of Theories of Everything
17:02 : Aaronson on the tragedy of Wolfram
19:21 : quantum cellular automata, Loop Quantum Gravity, string theory, quantum computing
21:31 : Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating's Clubhouse response and Theo Polya's anonymity
23:00 : Aaronson: Accountability and when anonymity does and does not matter
Background Material:
Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity paper:
geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloc...
Stephen Wolfram's Theory of Everything:
www.wolframphysics.org/
Brian Keating on experimental tests of Theories of Everything:
• Brian Keating: Testing...
Scott Aaronson's Book Review of a New Kind of Science:
arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089
Timothy Nguyen & Theo Polya. A Response to Geometric Unity:
timothynguyen.files.wordpress...
Twitter:
@iamtimnguyen
Webpage:
www.timothynguyen.org

[@markcarey67]

A hypergraph and a shiab operator walk into a (h)bar...

[@randymartin5500]

Timothy you are an excellent host for letting your guest speak their concept in a reasonable amount of time without interrupting them like most hosts do.

[@Woollzable]

When will the full episode be released? Thanks. 😃

[@caparn100]

From wolframphyiscs: Q: How can your models be consistent with Bell’s theorem? A: Despite the deterministic nature of the Wolfram model, consistency with Bell’s theorem is actually a very natural consequence of the combinatorial structure of the multiway causal graph. By allowing for the existence of causal connections not only between updating events on the same branch of evolutionary history, but also between updating events on distinct branches of evolution history, one immediately obtains an explicitly nonlocal theory of multiway evolution. More precisely, one extends the notion of causal locality beyond mere spatial locality, since events that are branchlike-local will not, in general, also be spacelike-local. Therefore, one is able to prove violation of the Bell-CHSH inequality in much the same way as one does for standard deterministic and nonlocal interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the de Broglie-Bohm or causal interpretation.

[@johnsolo123456]

Saving

[@squeakeththewheel]

It sounds like the multiway model is a quantum version of cellular automata, with a dash of Many Worlds thrown in, which could be very interesting if they can get concrete predictions out of it and see if it makes different ones than standard QM.

[@johnboze]

The Fine Structure constant is the RATIO of Electron / Quantum Foam Terminal Velocity DIVIDED BY The Terminal Velocity of Photon Vacuum Terminal Velocity AKA FS == Ve/c. Wolfram is only half way there and therefor half wrong! Kaku and Carol are ELITIES THAT CENSOR THE TRUTH OF THE "VACUUM'S AMBIENT EM FIELD": @FiringRoom1 Cosmic Redshift is due to HAWKLING EVAPORATION OF PHOTONS PERIOD END OF STORY... WE KNEW THIS IN THE 1970s! Photons Redshift Via Hawking Evaporation of Not "Virtual" EM Field Inertial Dipole Planck Particles: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y5exlXaBnNJ2kLM

[@MightyDrunken]

There is also the superdeterminism explanation which is what Gerard 't Hooft's hypothesis of "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" uses. Of course superdeterminism is viewed unfavourably but it circumvents Bell's Theorem and it is up to physicists to disprove it, or live with it.

[@squeakeththewheel]

@@MightyDrunken It's true that superdeterminism is logically possible. But I read 't Hooft's book on his ideas for a superdeterminism form of quantum theory, but in it he states that he has no real mathematical theory that works (that can reproduce the predictions of QM). And it is not the case that physicists have to accept any idea or theory they can't disprove. An extreme example is - they can't disprove that a God exists, but that doesn't mean that according to physics they have to accept that one does exist. It's the other way around - Fermi or someone remarked that such ideas are "not even wrong" because they cannot be proven nor disproven (at least within current knowledge. of that that could change).

[@tantzer6113]

The question of who deserves credit for an idea is uninteresting to me. “A New Kind of Science” is an amazing book, not only because of the visualizations, but also because of its clear and thought provoking discussions of many, many different topics in a unified framework. My favorite is its discussion of “computational irreducibility,” a concept that is philosophically significant. This is to say nothing of the countless historical and technical discussions in its endnotes. No “tragedy” here; just a book that should be celebrated for discussions that can be explored or criticized. And if through criticizing one of its ideas, Scott hit upon some original ideas, that too speaks to the value of book, i.e., its potential to stimulate a scientific debate.

[@rajeevgangal542]

Bought a new kind of science. Children's book masquerading as a serious one

[@Mr.PeabodyTheSkeptic]

Wtf? You lost me at you philosophy. You have lots of words that illuminate nothing. You're in the wrong room. Theology class is down the hall and to the left.

[@JohnVKaravitis]

​@@rajeevgangal542 You'd know.

[@ExecutiveChefLance]

@@rajeevgangal542 You must be a Particle Physicist.

[@carywalker7662]

Ah, and here my disinterest ends. I look around the world and wonder why people interject such emotion into societal questions we can reason through, but I must admit I like to mix great science ideas with the personalities of their discoverers. That's probably a failing of mine and I'm jealous of your ability to step back.

[@buttlesschap]

Hi wondering about how adult learners/mature students tend to do in physics programs. I went to UBC for biochem right after high school but dropped out after a year after some big family issues. I'm nearly 28 now and have been in plumbing/pipefitting ever since. I go through my old textbooks sometimes and do some basic problems, listen to science podcasts/talks, read scifi and generalist science books from rovelli, susskind and greene. No kids and wouldn't need student loans. Thinking of going to school for maybe mining engineering, geophysics or physics if there is a recession and im out of the job.

[@thechocolatemonster3392]

You’ll do great! It seems like you have the spark to learn. I’m a working engineer and I keep learning stuff, and I learn it a lot better than when I was in school. In fact, I would say that it makes more sense to go to college now.

[@thechocolatemonster3392]

You also have a much better appreciation for the world, and for the physical world as you work with your hands. This is underrated! So please figure out going back to school as you clearly have the love of learning in you.

[@wolfumz]

dude, just do it. School is much easier than working life, particularly if you're interested and motivated. A degree in physics will get you work in basically any field, especially if you have nominal people skills and you're not a weirdo. As an adult learner, I've often felt like I had crazy advantages over my classmates who are 18 and 20. You'll understand what I'm talking about when you get in. In my view, there is no replacement for _doing_ the problems, struggling with them, and thinking them through. if you want a head start, get a textbook, and work through the chapters. MIT Open Courseware is great. I was a heroin addict throughout my late teens and young adult life. At 26, I got clean and started working in a rehab as a counselor. I went back to school at 30, originally planning to get a degree in psychology while I continued to work. Today, I'm 34, wrapping up Waves and Optics, majoring in Comp Sci, and I couldn't be happier. I have a 4.0 and transferring to a UC school. I never thought of myself as "math person" (still don't), and I didn't even _like_ math until Calc 2. If I could do it, anyone can.

[@thechocolatemonster3392]

@@wolfumz I LOVE this message. It’s totally true - this nonsense that we have in our society that you have to finish some thing by a certain age is rubbish. You can totally go to college in your 20s/30s and later and do fantastic!

[@KitagumaIgen]

If you've kept the "mathematics-knives" slightly sharp you ought to do just as fine on that part as you would've at 19. You will have a "slight" advantage in maturity, which should help you loads, not least with motivation and drive.

[@vee__7]

Nice. Where's the full thing of this? Is it upcoming or already up somewhere?

[@TimothyNguyen]

Full episode coming out soon!

[@vee__7]

@Timothy Nguyen wicked. Always enjoy your vids!

[@wasdwasdedsf]

@@TimothyNguyen why do you have on a politicised mental patient? do you also prefer your presidents to be walking vegetables destroying the country?

[@bennettbullock9690]

"That's kind of a detail for the technicians to work out". I think this is what is profoundly disturbing about Weinstein's work at least. He's outsourcing the responsibility of making this correct while taking on no professional risk himself. When someone did look at his work, voluntarily - that's you, Timothy - and they came up with results that were sub-optimal, he turned into a bully. It was quite grotesque. Why doesn't Weinstein just fund a research lab into alternative theories? It's the problem with these entrepreneurs playing scientist - even if they have a strong academic background, they get so used to being obeyed and said yes to that they lose the ability to take the scathing levels of criticism needed to do any real work in these fields.

[@KeCasgrimola]

Hes a disturbed guy. Him and his brother have personality issues

[@shwifty123]

Just came across your podcast &this is exactly the content I've been looking for. Keep up the work, highly appreciate it!

[@ZeroOskul]

Hey! You rock, man!

[@eismscience]

This is awesome, Tim. I look forward to listening to this.

[@eismscience]

I was encouraged to hear Scott confirm in such a colorful way what is obvious to any self-respecting thinker, that even if your paper had been scrawled on a bathroom wall it, it clearly deserves to be taken seriously. I have not given up hope that he will come around and square his shoulders to talk to you. I think a lot of good can come of it.

[@TimothyNguyen]

Correction: bathroom urinal.

[@mitchellhayman381]

Wolfram seems to me to be incredibly intelligent and insightful. His conversation with Lee Smolin was amazing. The way he picked up what Lee was saying, and saying it back to him in his own language was amazing. He seems to me as competent as any other mathematical physicist

[@simonmasters3295]

Agreed, and it is not just him others are involved

[@Ruktiet]

Stephen Wolfram is an absolute creative genius and very hard worker (a not to be underestimated quality). The fact he was able to snap out of the myopic pardigm that has dominated physics for the past 350+ years and, with the help of Jonathan Gorard, proposed a completely new way of looking at models for physics, inspired by his background in computer science, causal set theory, and with his concept of computational irreducibility in mind, is fantastic. Even if the paradigm of hypergraph rewriting rules fails to reproduce the adequate phenomena, it is still a step in the right direction by introducing this shocking new way of how to look at what the point of physics actually is; finding rules, as simple as possible, on data, such that it perfectly reproduces all the physical phenomena we care about. Whether that data might be discrete or continuous, or whatever is out there, and the rules applied to it simple differential equations or something else, doesn’t really matter too much. It might even be provably possible that the nature of those rules and the data it’s applied to might not even allow a physical observer to determine whether or not the underlying structure is discrete or continuous.

[@TensorLiquidExp]

@@Ruktiet >shocking new way of how to look at what the point of physics actually is; finding rules, as simple as possible, on data, such that it perfectly reproduces all the physical phenomena we care about 😂 It's been done since Newton looking at Kepler's astronomy data and giant amount of unrelated observations of earthly objects and reduce them all to 3 simple rules. That's probably why Wolfram thought he's the next Newton 💀 Physicists haven't stopped doing it that way either, just that competent physicists who actually work out the details of their model and not just making big claims, will quickly realize, rules at least as simple as QR and QFT have so far produce huge gaps and inconsistencies (again, devil is in the details). Discretizing spacetime leads to breaking of Lorentz covariance and all kinds of mess. But of course you can wave it all away if you target different toy models My opinion on Wolfram would drastically improve if either 1. he works out his model in details to like 1% of String theory that can reproduce both Gravity and Quantum Field Theory at low energy (I'm not asking for any observable prediction) OR 2. His followers show some basic understanding of scientific method, physics, math

[@Ruktiet]

Wrong. The rules you are talking about, such as those of Kepler, still assume an underlying complex structure, as do the physicists you compare Stephen Wolfram to. The whole point of his ideas, which I find ground breaking, is to assume as little as possible, and find a structure which shows as much potential complexity as possible under that constraint, and then look for instantiations of that structure so that it shows all of the phenomena we observe in physics. For anyone who has read about his previous ideas from his “a new kind of science” book, the idea of simple rules which show complex behavior (sometimes computation) come to mind. Inspired by causal set theory and his background in computer science, a hypergraph rewriting system was chosen. The rules as well as initial conditions are parametrizable, and thus exhaustively searchable, even though the search space is immense, even for very small initial nodes and simple rules. Even if this approach does not lead to fruitful results, it is a very creative step in the right direction by at least challenging our anthropocentric assumptions. And to be honest, I don’t understand why you care about the competence in classical subjects of his followers. First of all, it’s not the followers who develop the theory, and second of all, the theory is so low-threshold that even a high schooler can grasp it. It probably even helps people develop an interest in physics where they didn’t before@@TensorLiquidExp

[@TensorLiquidExp]

@@Ruktiet I suppose I wasn't clear, but what you alleged to, finding the simplest rule set that reproduces observed phenomena, was what Newton and other physicists do too. I'm not saying there is nothing new about Wolfram's approach i.e. I'm not saying Newton started from nothing but discrete rules. I will elaborate why Wolfram's approach only sounds simple to laymen, but actually aren't simple to serious physicists. Since you mention causal set, maybe by "underlying complex structure" you mean the background spacetime for events and interactions to happen, yes Newton and other physicists do assume that background exists and it's a continuum. That's how we do physics. Spacetime is not part of the "simple" rule system, the simple rules are what they created on top of it to describe data. Given the trouble with how gravity is baked into spacetime itself unlike other forces, the obvious idea to quantize gravity would be to quantize spacetime. That's where people get the idea that, maybe we start from nothing but discrete rules and let spacetime emerge from discrete structures. Wolfram's approach is in this group. (cont. below)

[@pmcate2]

@2:35 This guy read and wrote a review of a massive physics book when he was 19 AND a he was grad student. I hate the fact that at that age I was just being a typical college kid. I didn't even know the beauty of physics and math until I was in my late 20's. Life isn't fair.

[@TimothyNguyen]

Check out June Huh's biography for inspiration.

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

😱

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

U can take comfort in the fact that, I had similar vision, but couldn't do anything cos I'm a brat with severely disorganised mind who started a lot of stuff but couldn't get anything done. So much so, that anyone will barely take me seriously anymore. Oh! I'm from a 3rd world nation on top of all these.

[@wbaumschlager]

I wrote reviews of world literature in highschool.

[@mikealexander1935]

Doesn't both me, guys like him just live on a different plane than I do.

[@Sock1122]

Appreciate that both these men are focused on trying to determine the scientific truth and that its not about discrediting or mocking the other 2

[@jardelcestari7030]

I sensed at least a little bit of mocking.

[@kevon217]

Great, lively discussion.

[@Emerson1]

this was great 👍

[@arthurrimbaud3414]

By the way, Tim, if you and your colleague would have written a paper CONFIRMING the claims of Eric Weinstein regarding Geometric Unity, Eric's obdurate and absurd dismissal of the critique would disappear.

[@tonytanner3048]

Awesome podcast I think Wolframs exploration is very different and lot more thought out than given credit. In my opinion it is what physics needs it is not necessarily a deep theory as yet but what is cool is that it is playing with graphs as a fundamental structure which is a really flexible yet tangible mathematical structure. Another interesting thing about the project is the parallel to computational category theory and computational chaos theory. I believe ultimately if the project does not further physics it will atleast further computational mathematics.

[@lubricustheslippery5028]

It's a lot of Jontan Gorard's work that have found mathematical way to get relativity and quantum physics out from Wolframs hypergrafs. I can't evaluate how good it is but the model is attractive in many ways. I agree that it's not probable that they have the right details in the model but that it can further the understanding and math either way. And we should also see string theory in a similar way. I am interested in the claims about quantum computing. I also reacted to when Wolfram spoke about quantum computing probably not being possible when others say they have working quantum computers... Erik Weinstein's comment on Wolfram physics project is also interesting. He said that it's getting to particles and the standard model of physics that is hard and that the Wolframs physics project haven't started with that, so it's not that interesting.

[@snarkyboojum]

And yet, he hasn't made any predictions or new discoveries. Science usually starts with a conjecture about a new idea following by an explanation. All Wolfram seems to be doing is attempting to explain existing ideas with cellular automata.

[@user-yo6xb6ud6d]

@@snarkyboojum tbf neither has string theory. Theories at that scale, especially ones that try to unify qm and gr, simply aren't "practically" testable. Technically they are, but we can't build the tools. That doesn't mean the ideas aren't worth exploring.

[@snarkyboojum]

Of course, explore all ideas - the good ones will naturally attract others to follow suit. The ideas with little merit (like String theory) will eventually die out. @@user-yo6xb6ud6d

[@TensorLiquidExp]

@@user-yo6xb6ud6d I dont think lack of testable prediction is a good criticism for Quantum Gravity scale either What notable about Wolfram's theory which claims to be theory of everything is, for a theory with as much evidence as string theory, it doesn't even have a toy model that works like how string theory reduces to GR and QFT at long distance limit... And people (especially those with undergrad/high school level of understanding of physics) slandered String Theorists (even though no String Theorist claims they are the next Newton, creating "new" science, Witten explicitly said there are a lot of mysteries they don't understand at fundamental level) Physicists would take Wolfram's theory more seriously if it only claims to be a discrete model that reproduces some tiny aspect of gravity and some tiny aspect of quantum field. Many lay people probably already prefer Wolfram's "new" physics than other alternatives (That require understanding actual physics and see the difficulties with quantization of spacetime instead of playing with discrete rules) and ofc they readily tell physicists what to do :))

[@hatmatrix4376]

Tim, I was a Long-Horn undergraduate and love this speaker (a UT man). Your AZN bro.

[@isonlynameleft]

Loved what I saw so far, where is the rest of it?

[@jjreddick377]

Thank you

[@TimothyOBrien6]

Glad to see Scott acknowledging that Wolfram's recent theory is promising. Not sure why he spent so long refuting his old work which didn't involve multiway systems. They are entirely different beasts, and his original criticism does not apply to the newer formalism.

[@blengi]

Being a bit of a naïf about all this, what are the most concrete predictions Weinstein's/Wolfram's TOEs make which are plausibly testable or outrageously intuitively compelling beyond where we are today?

[@phulcq6716]

I think Wolfram has proposed a few (mostly vague) consequences at this point, but one that stuck with me is that his formulation suggests that entanglement has a maximum speed like c, but larger. No idea if any thought has been put into how to test that.

[@maxwelldillon4805]

Bell inequality violations just mean that at least one of the assumptions of Bell's Theorem is wrong.

[@brothermine2292]

No it doesn't.

[@maxwelldillon4805]

@@brothermine2292 Yes it does. The only other interpretation you can have is that QM, as currently formulated, is correct. But guess what, that's wrong, because QM is KNOWN to be internally inconsistent, due to the linearity of the Schrödinger equation contradicting the nonlinearity of the measurement process. Not to mention the other issues it fails to address including the measurement problem and the Heisenberg cut.

[@brothermine2292]

@@maxwelldillon4805 : It occurs to me that there's more than one way to express Bell's Theorem, so your phrase "the assumptions of Bell's Theorem" is ambiguous. It's doubly ambiguous, because you could also be referring to assumptions listed in the theorem's conclusion, such as assumptions x & y if the theorem is expressed as "if p & q, then either x is false or y is false." Why don't you name the assumptions of Bell's Theorem, to help clarify your claim?

[@spacefertilizer]

@@brothermine2292 look up statistical independence Sabine Hossenfelder has a good video about this

[@brothermine2292]

What does Scott mean by "freshly generated randomness" when he says that's implied by Bell's theorem? Bell's theorem showed that local hidden variables can't explain entanglement correlations. But it doesn't imply the correlations cannot be explained by *nonlocal* hidden variables. I don't see why nonlocal hidden variables can't offer a deterministic quantum theory, in which "fresh" randomness is not fundamental randomness.

[@carlhitchon1009]

Yep. I don't know why he claimed it as a proof of randomness. It's not that at all. In fact "freshly generated randomness" seems a silly idea since on the average the results of this randomness converge to many decimal places to an exact value.

[@brothermine2292]

@Carl Hitchon : Why do you say the average converges to an exact value? That sounds very wrong, because probabilities are just probabilities and each trial is presumably independent of the other trials. Can you provide an example to illustrate what you mean?

[@carlhitchon1009]

@@brothermine2292 For example the experiment referred to in Bell's theorem. Each time the experiment is done, a "random" result is produced, however QM predicts the results of many, many tries to be an exact value. So the supposedly "freshly generated randomness" of each trial, isn't really random, it has a bias predicted by QM that in the long run converges to an exact value. In other words the "randomness" is smart, it knows how to produce exactly a certain ratio of results. Therefore calling this "pure randomness" is incorrect IMO.

[@brothermine2292]

@@carlhitchon1009 : That "convergence to an exact value" still sounds wrong. Like a random walk with exact 1/2 probability of stepping right or left, the expected value (after an even number of steps) may be exactly zero but the actual measured distance from zero after n steps has a standard deviation that _increases_ with n. Please be clearer about *which calculation* on Bell test measurements you believe converges to an exact value.

[@carlhitchon1009]

@@brothermine2292 Off hand I don't remember all the details, but in the entangled photons with polarizers experiment, which is similar to the magnet one Bell used, QM math produces exact values for the average number of coincidences of states of the photons depending on the angle between polarizers. The average number of coincidences is impossible to explain with local hidden variables. That is what Bell proved. Some non local conspiracy is at work. A random walk does not converge. But the behavior of photons does to a very high degree of precision. If we flip a "fair" coin long enough the ratio of heads and tails converges to precisely 1/2. The reason is obvious, the coin has no bias because it's symmetrical. We can calculate results with QM, but we really don't have a deep understanding of why it is the way it is. It seems to me that physicists are quite slow to accept what Bell demonstrated. Nature is non local.

[@liminal6823]

Scott Aaronson is my spirit animal

[@kimwelch4652]

There's a difference between random and unpredictable. It has to do with the information entropy of the "signal". Cryptographically weak random numbers are mathematically predictable at least in volume. Cryptographically strong "random numbers" like what you get from quantum events in the same class as radioactive decay are unpredictable (the kind Helmut Schmidt used). What the Strong Fee Will Theorem is talking about is Choice which is unpredictable vs. deterministic and/or random which are predictable within bounds. The implication is when an experimenter chooses a setup for their experiment, the particles chooses their response. The particles response is as unpredictable as the experimenters choice. I think it was Conway who did a lecture on a Gedankenexperiment where you have a deterministic and a random universe and he showed how they are mathematically identical.

[@bissbort]

Keep up the good work, Tim!

[@trishankkarthik]

Hey Timothy, finally watched this video. A few comments: 1. One could argue that Wolfram does take too much credit for some ideas (such as the universe is computational in nature), but it is true that no one else has explored them to the depth that he has. 2. Aaronson is correct about the limitations of the ANKOS deterministic cellular automata model in describing quantum phenomena (such as the Bell inequality). 3. However, his "refutation" of the hypergraph model is disappointing: it's not much other than, "Well, I don't see how these low-level machine code could lead to the higher-level physics I am familiar with, so who cares?" Like I said above, I am not aware of a theory of everything that is as fundamentally computational as this one, and it is disappointing to see the current generation of physicists like Aaronson and Hossenfelder dismiss it so easily. 4. Your following observation is on point: even if Wolfram turns out to be wrong, he is willing to handle criticism, unlike Weinstein and Keating. IMHO, one is far more intellectually deep and honest than the other. The worst intellectual mistake to make is to even begin to compare Wolfram and Weinstein's theories of everything, which are not at all at the same level.

[@TimothyNguyen]

Hey Trishank. I have not spent time studying Wolfram's work so I can't comment on his work or Scott's criticism. And yes, Weinstein and Wolfram are not to be compared. This was simply an off the cuff conversation with Scott, who could comment on Wolfram, and myself who could comment on Weinstein.

[@trishankkarthik]

@@TimothyNguyen I understand, but the title doesn't accurately reflect that. Anyway, hope you to get read up on Wolfram's work and interview him someday!

[@TimothyNguyen]

@Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy Just curious, what would you propose as a title? Also I invited Wolfram onto my podcast previously (which would motivate me to read up on his work) but it seems he's not interested.

[@trishankkarthik]

@@TimothyNguyen Maybe "Nguyen and Aaronson on why Wolfram's TOE is scientific even if wrong vs Weinstein's", but someone (or an LLM) needs to work on making it catchier

[@thatonegamer9547]

@@TimothyNguyen the problem with this computational theory is that it makes the claim that underlying computation gives rise to quantum mechanics and the observable universe. Another is that they admit it is fully deterministic. Quantum mechanics is observably probabilistic in nature. The third is the peer review aspect. It’s not much of a technical critique, but it’s one that needs to be noted, because you need to have people in the scientific community verifying its consistency with known physics. My takeaway from the whole thing (from some of his fans I talked to) is that they take a philosophical position (computational equivalence) and run with it as a physical truth. Basically like saying all 2s are identical. More specifically, just because I can implement a Turing Machine in the card game Magic the Gathering, and that that Turing machine is in some sense the same as one implemented on a computer, or in the game of life, that doesn't imply anything about the universe. Also, our universe is computable, but not in the sense that it is a simulation. You can simulate things about the universe on the computer, but that’s still taking a huge leap to saying the universe is some sort of computational system. As far as the views of Hossenfelder among physicists, she’s good at what she does, but her cellular automata theory with t’Hooft isn’t much better. One of the key things that’s wrong with it is the idea of superdeterminism which is unfalsifiable.

[@alanwilson175]

Fascinating discussion. One aspect is the notion of indeterminate things (states, variables, properties, …), as though this must be different from mathematics. Well… maybe not. It turns out some of math is indeterminate too. Mathematicians don’t like to talk about it, because it directly confronts the mathematical conceit that math can figure out everything, but the sad truth is that some things are beyond determination. This hardly justifies a general disregard for mathematical precision. But it does suggest that there are limits.

[@Michael-kp4bd]

Any mathematician worth their salt understands the implications of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem

[@randomracki9453]

I don't think Stephen Wolfram has produced a model of the universe as yet the project is ongoing.

[@okuno54]

Ah I see, I was confused for a while at the start b/c I didn't realize the multi-way thing was newer than your critique. As far as predictions go... string theory's predominance has really ruined at least the public's perception of physics: it kept on giving no testable predictions, and now every silly no-predictions theory can kinda be excused b/c "well, string theory was good enough". What weirds me out though, is that Wolfram is very clear that his graph rewriting is computationally irreducible, which like... so it could do anything if you program it right? That doesn't sound even in-pronciple-testable. It was a fun romp for me though on the foundations of computing side!

[@notlessgrossman163]

Excuse my complete ignorance, but wasn't one of the crux of Wolframs theories is that some cellular automata algorithms exhibit what appears to be true randomness?

[@audiodead7302]

I don't think so. They exhibit pseudo randomness. Indistinguishable from true randomness. But entirely predictable (if you know the seed and the algorithm).

[@notlessgrossman163]

@@audiodead7302 ok but, bear with me, if the 'genesis' seed of a simulated universe was unknown would that predictability, you claim, still exist?

[@audiodead7302]

@@notlessgrossman163 If you didn't know the seed and algorithm, you wouldn't be able to predict the future. However, if you ran the 'simulation' over and over again (from the same initial conditions), you would get exactly the same result. So the 'simulation' is deterministic.

[@seditt5146]

Last I seen, which was a while ago, I remember him mentioning they had created some Automata with rather basic rules which were shown to rather accurately model quantum mechanics and I personally with a little refinement could see this actually going somewhere. I forget what the name of it is but there is a similar way to simulate physics and QM using a three dimensional grid with energy potentials and the means of passing energy between each grid point is basic calculations yet can produce decent results. A theory like I seen from Wolfram could easily be envisions in which the big bang was the first "cell" in the simulations then all you see around us are simply emergent properties and such an idea would lend massive weight to the simulation hypothesis because we have ALREADY created such things. Just because they are simpler and do not run as long does not mean the walkers in The Game of Life are any less alive than you or I in that sense. Idk, I find it interesting.

[@notlessgrossman163]

@@audiodead7302 a simulation or for that matter, our universe being deterministic is a valid premise, .. in Wolframs theories he posits irreducible complexity, so your premise of a deterministic simulation would require running the simulation from the moment of creation, and QM would be on some level 'deterministic' as well. So yes the cellular automata algorithms seed may only simulate randomness but may be closer to the true nature of the universe. Eg. The measurement problem stems from trying to seperate the instrument from the subject.. just my layman's terms

[@frankshifreen]

Tim- what gets me about Eric Weinstein is his anger- he is always raging at "the community" as if there is a plot to exclude brilliant people and theories. Brian Keating seems very affable but has an underlying anger (Losing the Nobel Prize). Saw a Video with Fridman where Weinstein says he is too busy. to publish his recent update and it kind of seems like a poor excuse

[@advaitrahasya]

Tweakable mathematical models are not necessarily descriptive of mechanism. The standard of mathematical accuracy is an obstacle to understanding. The Copernican model was at first shabby at prediction compared to the epicyclic model. To gain a truer understanding of planetary motions, Copernicus escaped geocentricism. Those who want to understand the fundamental need to escape chronocentricism and atomism. Some masters of metaphysics and a few practitioners of high technology know … but physics may be lost in dogma for another century.

[@martinepstein9826]

I think Scott should come up with a complexity-theoretic theory of everything and you can refute it on gauge-theoretic grounds, and then you should come up with a gauge-theoretic theory of everything and Scott can refute it on complexity grounds. That would be fun.

[@markkennedy5479]

Please, please, please, everybody here, learn the difference between rebutting and refuting. That would not only be fun, it would upgrade the conversation and this site's credibility. A rebutted idea is still alive, possibly even kicking; a genuinely refuted one is as dead as yesterday. Whether the rebuttals made here qualify as a refutation is exactly what's at issue.

[@ExecutiveChefLance]

@@markkennedy5479 Very True. Rebuttals are what makes Science. I agree with Einstein 100% on Copenhagen Interpretation. But Bohr did an Masterclass job of taking every single one of Einstein's rebuttals and countering them. Such a good job that questioning it became dogma. Which is unfortunate because like I said I think Einstein is right. We just need better Technology. The advancement of knowledge is actually directly related to idea of Complexity. The Island of Knowledge. And the Shores of Ignorance. Our Island got so big that are Shores of Ignorance became such that we couldn't believe our own eyes.

[@vauchomarx6733]

Scott is wrong about hidden variables, because he misinterprets cellular automata as a non-local theory. Wolfram's theory is consistent with both Bell inequality and special relativity, because it is *superdeterministic*, i.e. it violates statistical independence.

[@Hack3r91]

This is also what I got from Wolfram's description of it, glad it's not just me!

[@thatonegamer9547]

So is it superdeterministic? I keep getting mixed answers when I ask this question.

[@Hack3r91]

@@thatonegamer9547 according to Jonathan Gorard, this theory is consistent with Bell's theorem in the same way other deterministic theories featuring non-local hidden variables do. This was stated during the second wolfram physics project stream (technical q&a)

[@freedom_aint_free]

Concerning the proof of stake that Ethereum has transitioned from Proof of work: It is totally an error, no matter how much money one has, the machines who does the mining can only be produced at most at a rate X owing to laws of nature, logistic, etc. On the other hand, proof of stake, costs basically nothing e someone with enough money could potentially buy the whole blockchain (let's say the government for instance, on purpose to break the system). And there are many many more problems.

[@Snowflake_tv]

Cooool! Nice debating

[@hungryformusik]

I noted many times that if a guy is so much convinced of what he’s doing is right (like Wolfram), he most certaintly is wrong.

[@bonerici]

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. W.C. Fields That's what I feel when I read either wolfram or Weinstein

[@bb-andersenaccount9216]

i guess that diminishing wolfram's points laughing at them with you know ^n is very limited.

[@cybervigilante]

I revisited this and decided you can have a Theory of a Lot of Stuff, but not a Theory of Everything. That would violate Goedel's Theorem. Besides, it's obvious we don't understand everything or our technology would be much more advanced. We'd have nuclear fusion and antigravity, at the very least.

[@ZeroOskul]

I usually have something to say to videos like these but I can't find anything wrong with it or anything to add. I like to watch Brian Keating and he often has Eric as a guest, and, weirdly, when I mention you, many GU fans will claim that you never read Eric's Apr. 1, 2021 paper, even though on Apr. 2, 2021 you published a tweet stating that you had indeed read that paper and it answered not one of your concerns. Apparently the GU community never read your tweet and are still upset that you never read the 69-page paper that you called "a testament to perseverence". I am going to encourage Keating to have you on with Eric to discuss, not debate, the validity of his GU. You seem to be an expert about it.

[@____uncompetative]

Robert Wright interviewed Timothy Nguyen and asked him about the 2021 paper and Nguyen said: "I didn't look at it that carefully." It seems he went to the contents, then straight to §8 and was still unhappy with the provisional definition for the *Ship In A Bottle* operator which he thought ought to have a formal definition to make _Geometric Unity_ a coherent theory, ignoring that it was an _Author's Working Draft, v 1.0_ which had a couple of email addresses on the first page inviting general and technical feedback. Then when Eigenbros. made the mistake of inviting him on to talk about his alleged flaws in _Geometric Unity_ he misrepresented Eric's work and criticised the version of the theory from eight years earlier rather than the 2021 paper which had come out two months earlier which invalidated all of his concerns. At one point he is talking about 'red flags' and shows himself up by saying he did a CTRL+F to search the paper for "Spinᶜ(4)" expecting that its absence would conclusively prove something when other authors represent this with different notation, in the context of leveraging his PhD thesis work on the Seiberg-Witten equations which Weinstein regards as describing a toy model and are not structural to his work in progress _Unified Field Theory._ There is zero evidence that Nguyen's anonymous coauthor watched the 2020 upload of the 2013 Oxford University lecture, or read the 2021 paper as there have never been any criticisms made of Weinstein's proposal to generalise the _Einstein Field Equations_ (plural - Nguyen leaves out 195 of them) to 14 complexified dimensions, either in the February 2021 paper _A Response to Geometric Unity_ or in the two and a half years that have followed since Eric published his April 2021 draft paper with lots to be skeptical about in §8-12 especially page 44 and §12.4 which could be fine, but need someone expert in _General Relativity_ to comment upon. Yet, silence. This strongly implies Theo Polya isn't multiple individuals, but a sock puppet account created and run by Timothy Nguyen. It is reasonable to think this as it serves Tim well to have a coauthor who could be thought to be an expert in _General Relativity_ whilst he knows about _Quantum Field Theory_ and in particular _Gauge Theory._ Just opportunistically sniping at a few mispercieved flaws in relation to _Gauge Theory_ and _Group Theory_ might not have as much authority as calling Eric's work a _Theory of Everything_ when he never said it was that at the time, and building it up so that more fame can be accrued by alleging that it is technically catastrophically flawed, ostensibly from a pair of critics who, between them, have the expertise to critique a theory that seeks to replace _Quantum Field Theory_ and _General Relativity._ So, Polya could be a real person, but based on the evidence I think he is a sock. I don't believe Nguyen when he tweets. I distrust his motivations. I don't think he is a genuine person who wants to help Weinstein. I consider him a parasite. He saw the Fermionic complex slide in the 2013 talk and claimed _Geometric Unity_ wasn't U(64, 64) Weyl spinors decomposed from U(128, ℂ) Dirac spinors. Maybe he has bad eyesight and missed this detail, as he missed the subscripts on Eric's equations of motion, or the curly bracket beneath X⁴ ⤷ U which referred to that whole thing as the Observerse and not just U which means as far as Tim is concerned the Observerse does not include proto-spacetime, when infact spacetime observes the Ehresmannian manifold where the single unified field omega interacts with itself in 14 complexified dimensions that have comprehensively balanced symmetries, and the reason The Standard Model is a messy collection of broken symmetries with an apparent preference in our universe for "particles" which have left handed spin is due to spacetime only having 4 dimensions and having no way to retain the structure which makes better mathematical sense in 14 complexified dimensions.

[@____uncompetative]

Nguyen only commends Eric to appear to be playing nice to bystanders, yet listen to the tone he has when speaking to Robert Wright or Eigenbros. or Brandon van Dyck and it is soon apparent that Nguyen has a smug superiority complex which would be okay if he wasn't completely incompetent in his criticism. Eric has championed for more people in theoretical physics to be tolerated for their bad personalities provided that they deliver results, and I don't think Eric minded Tim at first until he used his wife's work without credit in a KZbin video explaining _Gauge Theory._ This simple discourtesy could be disregarded and Eric could be seen as being oversensitive in his overreaction, but then publishing a nasty critique of their joint work on _Economics as Gauge Theory_ is unlikely to make Eric want to sit in the same room as Tim, let alone discuss his theory with him, when it is apparent that Tim doesn't understand it, and the fact that I can critique his response despite being an art school drop out who got very bored in the pandemic lockdown and took a shallow dip into every hyperlink on every topic and name mentioned in Eric's paper to form a loose mind map of terminology and context to glean the gist of what the hell was even being talked about, and on seeing Tim's response immediately find I could make sense of it and that it was wrong in numerous places - basically, throwing valid criticisms at a strawman invented by Nguyen which was obfuscated by an unnecessary change of notation to frustrate anyone wanting to make side-by-side comparisons with the 2013 lecture, and bamboozling and gaslighting many who were genuinely curious to regard _Geometric Unity_ as deeply flawed, only glazed with a bland academic professionalism by saying: "Unfortunately, *the details for this unification,* as far as the authors can tell, *are hardly provided* and thus the central insights of the theory are *not possible to verify.* Our conclusion is that, *even supposing the previous technical concerns could be addressed,* the *volume of missing* or *inexplicit computations* renders the *formulation* of GU *largely incomplete* ...Freeman Dyson said “It is better to be wrong than to be *vague.”* A good justification for this dictum is that *truth often arises from a well-discerned error,* especially when it is *aided by the help of others.* Every scientific theory has its *flaws,* but those that have stood the test of time have done so by being developed through the collective efforts of the scientific community. We hope our response is an encouragement to Weinstein to provide *further clarity to his ideas,* ideally *as a technical paper."* This subtle text implies that the speculative lecture from 2013 was lacking in *details* Earlier in the _Response_ we get this in the Introduction: "Though Weinstein asserts that the theory is only partially presented, we feel that substantive comments can be made on the provided material." See the problem? Tim contradicts himself. He says the theory was partially presented, yet then concludes by complaining about a lack of *details.* This is hypocrisy as any critic keen to comment on what they accept is only partially presented material would cut the creator a lot of slack for their work in progress being provisional and lacking in details. Indeed, what is crazy is that the encouragement to "provide *further clarity to his ideas,* ideally *as a technical paper."* is a bit rich when you find out from watching Tim detail the timeline of events to Brandon van Dyck that he knew Eric was going to publish a paper and had the option to wait to read it and improve his response by being able to cite section and equation numbers and reproduce diagrams from it, but he went ahead and published anyway and then five weeks later all his concerns were invalidated as _Geometric Unity_ had ostensibly changed from how he had mispercieved it eight years earlier (actually, it hadn't changed, it was just presented with some things written on the blackboard which were an oversimplification of what was in the slides shown within the 2013 lecture, not the Supplementary Slide Explainer which was appended to that video recording), it was U(128, ℂ) in 2013 and not U(128) as Tim claimed and then made out would be incompatible were the SHIAB to be complexified when it isn't if it is U(128, ℂ). It is true that _Geometric Unity_ is *not possible to verify* but it does predict exotic Rarita-Schwinger Spin ¾ matter (so it is falsifiable), which is more than Ed Witten can say about _M-theory_ after 40 years of the best minds wasting time on it. I guess I will have to remind the reader that Eric's paper is entitled: _Geometric Unity: Author's Working Draft, v 1.0_ and that means that, despite the decades he has spent on this, it will still require at least another five for another version of the _Author's Working Draft_ to be published, one which might provide a formal definition for the SHIAB operators, only for Tim to then harp on about some other perceived weak spot in the theory, which is likely to be there and be different with every iteration and version until it becomes final or is abandoned. Usually, papers go through this behind closed doors, so the quality of peer reviewed papers is quite good. Eric has the email addresses on the first page to elicit general and technical feedback and Tim could have availed himself of either and Eric would likely have welcomed his constructive criticism otherwise why put them there? The only critique I could make is that Equation number (11.10) shouldn't be there, as I am not sufficiently mathematically sophisticated to find anything else that might be awry. I can however spot where Tim hasn't paid attention, or is purposefully misrepresenting _Geometric Unity_ in order to criticise flaws which he has effectively invented. It is impossible to say which. Do I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume incompetence over malice? The conclusion quotes Dyson to "punch down" on what is a caricature of Eric's reputation by implicit comparison with a very famous theoretical physicist. This is silly as Eric has said many times that he is not a theoretical physicist, despite having a PhD in Mathematical Physics from Harvard University. All that was a lifetime ago and he doesn't even describe himself as an economist, and plays that down in interviews, and is happy to say he is an entertainer and podcaster, with others accurately categorising him as a famous public intellectual and cultured polymath. The motive behind this quote is to use Dyson to criticise the inferior Weinstein for being *vague* when a lot of his 2013 presentation is presenting the historical context of fundamental theoretical physics to explain that he thinks science took a wrong turn in abandoning the approach of Albert Einstein and we need to revisit his unfinished _Unified Field Theory_ and ask if he got stuck because he picked an unnecessarily restricted set of dimensional measures whose cardinality could not then be used to specify the size of a _Quantum Field Theory_ on an auxiliary manifold. Less intervention. Less conservative orthodoxy and we get a universe growing the symmetries that specify the behaviour of all observed phenomena within that universe, without any insertion of parameters to make the math work. This is compelling in its elegance and economical too as it provides just enough of an elaboration to fit all phenomena, including Dark Energy and Dark Matter. It isn't as if it is Spin(16) yielding U(256), or Spin(18, ℂ) yielding U(256, 256), in which there would be a surfeit of room for extra phenomena that have yet to be observed in reality and so very likely don't exist as we would have seen some evidence of them by now, cosmologically or within particle colliders. Here it could be Spin(18, ℂ) if the exogenous model applied, as X⁴ would grow U¹⁴ as normal, but then this auxiliary space would not be immersed within proto-spacetime but I guess be an adjacent Ehresmannian manifold of 14-dimensions, which would then be complexified to allow for the theory to be non-chiral. Presumably, the higher you go dimensionally the higher energy you need in the LHC to confirm some predicted bosonic or fermionic field is not there, or any other symmetry that might not have been apparent to us. It will likely involve more deep field astronomy of violent catastrophies to have the universe be our lab and provide clues as to how it is organised.

[@____uncompetative]

Tim wants to come across as an ally so says *aided by the help of others* implicitly referring to himself, despite him damaging _Geometric Unity_ by gaslighting many into not reading Eric's paper for themselves by appearing on Robert Wright's podcast, entitled "Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot?" where Tim said Eric "admits defeat" which mischaracterises the substance of §8 being the provisional definition of the SHIAB operator. This is like having a programming language where the + operator has been semantically overloaded to deal with tuples except there is a bug in it and consequently this comparison isn't TRUE: (7, 7) == (6, 4) + (1, 3) This is incredibly naïve as programmers know that numerous bugs persist in the JavaScript code that allows this webpage to function yet programmers know about all the pitfalls and have found workarounds, and even a safe subset of JavaScript called TypeScript which avoids these problems, and JavaScript could fix these semantic issues in future versions of the language, but it would break some legacy code which should probably be ripped out anyway as it is a fluke it even works with bad logic. Consequently, this is analogous to _Geometric Unity_ having a family of Ship In A Bottle operators whose intention is to eliminate "the Weyl curvature contribution to recover Riemannian geometry's ability to form Einstein tensors for gravity in such a way as to preserve Ehresmannian gauge covariance" (direct quote from the paper). However, if that sounds complicated the definition for our + operator would be something like: "the + operator when used in an infix context ignoring carriage returns as well as indentation and extra spaces sums the corresponding expressions element-wise in a pair of tensors of any dimensions which have the exact same shape and contain no NULL expressions raising a syntax error at compile time if the rows and columns and layers are detected to be incompatible". Feel free to persuade Dr Brian Keating to have Tim on his show to discuss _Geometric Unity,_ but as it is demonstrably in evidence that Tim doesn't understand it there would be no benefit to his audience. There would be no benefit to me going on in his place, even though I understand it better (insofar as I understand Tim definitely does not). I posted an explanation of _Geometric Unity_ for the layman in a single tweet and Eric phoned me up and I said I was prepared to delete it if I had inadvertently misrepresented it, and he was fine for it to stay up as it was only supposed to provide a gist of an understanding. He then asked me what I wanted to ask him about and I asked him if it would be okay for me to explain _Geometric Unity_ to him with my layman's terminology with him being able to interrupt at any point if I had misunderstood anything. He only had one correction, which stemmed from Wikipedia being wrong about Howard Georgi's _Grand Unified Theory_ being SO(10) when it was actually Spin(10). The thing is if I hadn't known about SO(10) beforehand I doubt I would have had the key to unlock my gist of an understanding, as there is a SO(64, 64) in the paper and I was inspired to wonder if this might be a bigger Special Orthogonal group, and I was right in that guess and everything else flowed out from there otherwise I wouldn't have got very far.

[@____uncompetative]

Tim is an expert with Quantum Computers and should stick to doing that. Him writing a response to Pia Malaney and Eric's lecture on _Economics as Gauge Theory_ could be misinterpreted as obsessive behaviour. My comments could too, but I am motivated by the injustice I see that has been caused by a preemptive strawman critique by an incompetent parasitic ignoramus, when he isn't gaslighting people into not reading Eric's paper to assess its merits for themselves he has this to say in the ABSTRACT of his response which is laced with barely disguised bile through the use of a couple of mocking puns: _A Response to Economics as Gauge Theory_ We provide an analysis of the recent work by Malaney-Weinstein on “Economics as Gauge Theory” presented on November 10, 2021 at the Money and Banking Workshop hosted by University of Chicago. In particular, we distill the technical mathematics used in their work into a form more suitable to a wider audience. Furthermore, we resolve the conjectures posed by Malaney-Weinstein, revealing that *they provide no discernible value* for the calculation of index numbers or rates of inflation. Our conclusion is that the main contribution of the Malaney-Weinstein work is that *it provides a striking example of how to obscure simple concepts through an uneconomical use of gauge theory.* Nguyen recently waylaid Michael Shermer and convinced him into proposing to be the host of a face-to-face discussion about _Geometric Unity_ on Michael's podcast, recommending Michael as being the "perfect moderator for a discussion between myself and one or both of Eric and Brian". Well, Brian doesn't know the theory quite as well as would be needed to provide a robust defense of it. He recognises why it is potentially significant but only at an abstract level based on certain characteristic traits, such as its formation of its spinors. Ask him about why there is a chiral anomaly in it and he can't say "There isn't. The Nakahara book is the vanilla case and _Geometric Unity_ is cherry chocolate" because there are two manifolds based on different geometries endowed with different types of spinors, rather than one bland manifold endowed with one regular type of spinor. The Nakahara book isn't wrong, it just explores the orthodox case most people would consider. _Geometric Unity_ is fancier than that because it has these two spaces. Now, perhaps Brian could be prepped by Eric to say that, but what if there is a 5th and 6th concern which Nguyen or "Polya" have thought up in the past two and a half years and are primed and ready to ambush Brian with. Is he allowed to phone a friend? I don't think this will work even if he agrees to attend, and the pattern has been that no one wants to upset Eric by platforming Tim. That is why he couldn't get on Lex Fridman's podcast. Joe Rogan might not even know his name, besides the other Tim successfully roasted Eric by saying that he hasn't invented anything useful like a Rotato, that was an amazing burn and although I get Eric is sensitive and was upset, he ought to accept that this is the cost of using _The Joe Rogan Experience_ as a megaphone in a calculated attempt to reach a tiny percentage of his listeners who may be intrigued enough to forward the show to their friends or family members who have some expertise in the dense mathematical terminology concerned. Eric essentially abused his guest status by trying to reach a handful of people who might be curious enough to read the paper and then email constructive feedback to him about it that he would find useful. It might even lead to contact with theoretical physicists, which at this stage he needs to take his theory into areas with more specific detail as he does not know how to calculate energy levels as he is not a _Quantum Field Theorist._ Now this is a real, but fair criticism of Eric Weinstein, which I don't mind if he hears. Maybe he has apologised to Joe Rogan for alienating his audience by talking over their heads in a deliberately technical way, so that a select few would recognise that language and take his ideas seriously. If he just came on and said: "The universe is attached to a secret cosmos, so that the fabric of spacetime hooks onto the loops of the other fabric, which is hidden 'behind the scenes' like VELCRO, and from within spacetime, we can only observe some of a pervasive single unified field which interacts with itself in 14-dimensions, as that has too many beautifully balanced symmetries to fit within our measly 4-dimensional universe." Then that would be fairly layman friendly and they could shift topic onto something else, or discuss how damn long it took him to come up with this theory and what chances it had of being tested and potentially falsified through its predictions not being confirmed. It would be about three minutes of the whole podcast. If Eric was keen to explain it in more detail then he would need to produce narrated animations, or more lectures geared to an intermediate level of understanding, say through the audience he has cultivated for _The Portal_ podcast, who make wikis to explain his harder episodes with supportive resources. The Rogan podcast is a Flare Gun fired to announce to the world that there is an alternative to scientists fiddling with tiny vibrating strings whilst the world slowly burns. _Geometric Unity_ is still in its early stages, and could have been incorrectly instantiated, and one shouldn't say "Oh it must be able to be judged harshly after 37 years of work" which is unrealistic when it is the work of one man and _String Theory_ is the work of thousands over the same time period and no one has even experimentally inferred the existence of a string or narrowed down which of the many instantiations it proposes might align with our specific universe (if any). It's possible it will yield fruit and we will be within _Type IIB String Theory_ and all the others flavours will be bunk, as _Type IIB_ is the only flavour where it has S-Duality with itself. I'm sure Eric wouldn't mind if there were some other way "off this planet" which could allow humanity to colonise exoplanets. Maybe this is marketing spiel, and he really doesn't want to live on Proxima Centauri b. However, he dresses up his _Unified Field Theory_ as a _Theory of Everything_ as Nguyen mischaracterised it as that in his paper and he was just lumbered with that label, and then dresses up his _Theory of Everything_ as a potential means for humanity to avoid being wiped out by nuclear or biological weapons or climate change catastrophe or asteroid or comet collision or Carrington event or Yosemite supervolcano explosion or runaway cybernetics including nanotechnology grey goo scenario where microscopic machines disassemble everything due to a mistake in their programming. I haven't listed AI as I don't think it is a threat long term like other people think, as I think any superintelligence will get bored and leave. What is fair about Tim Dillon's roast is that he wouldn't have done it if Eric Weinstein hadn't become significantly high profile as a quasi-modern day Einstein for him to puncture that hype bubble with his "based" Rotato remark. Eric should be pleased about this joke as it means his status is such that his message is getting airtime. If it wasn't, people wouldn't get the joke and Tim Dillon wouldn't have made it. Enough people know about Eric Weinstein's _Theory of Everything_ that Tim Dillon can be deeply sceptical about him as it is weird that Eric has done this without spending a lifetime in academia, like everyone else who comes up with a _Theory of Everything_ who is taken seriously by the alternative podcast media. Tim Dillon doesn't mock Stephen Wolfram because Wolfram got a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" at 21, and because he has never been a guest of _The Joe Rogan Podcast_ so he is probably unaware of _The Wolfram Physics Project_ which could be mocked for thus far only creating simulations of synthetic toy universes which have less than 4-dimensions. However, that is nerdy observational humour which is unlikely to make regular people laugh, and you can't say "He hasn't invented anything" because he has invented "Mathematica" and the "Wolfram | Alpha" website which does all manner of math calculations for you making him immune from the "Rotato" comparison. I suspect Eric is a very private person, but realised that if he wanted to take his theory onto the next logical step he would need help and so he would have to talk about it, but he would be sensible to build a public profile first, and network with people and see who is interested. One of those turned out to be Jeffrey Epstein, who was likely MOSSAD due to Ghislaine being the daughter of Robert Maxwell triple secret agent, no joke.

[@____uncompetative]

This gets almost nowhere as Silicon Valley startups seeking finance from THIEL CAPITAL are thick when it comes to PDEs and the EFEs so Eric founds the Intellectual Dark Web which is incredibly smart as the success of one (Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro or Douglas Murray) boosts the profiles of everyone else on the same stage. Even when they are separated the others get talked about in relation to them, which means Eric gets more mentions than he would have had he not set the IDW up in the first place. Eric probably got scared like many of us did during the pandemic that he was just the right demographic and weight to have an increased risk of fatality from COVID. I got it three times and nearly died and I am a similar age and quite fat and really need to lose weight, but if I die then I don't leave an unfinished project behind which could save the whole of humanity. Consequently, this situation of lockdown likely compelled him to stop procrastinating and organise his notes and put them through LaTeX typesetting software so it was all unambiguous and followed the accepted standards set down by the American Mathematical Society. I do think he set an unrealistic publication deadline and when he realised he had lost some notes on the SHIAB operator that had been written decades earlier he wasn't able to reconstruct them in the time he had left before his publication deadline. He could have delayed, but that would have destroyed the hype gained by pre-announcing it. Hopefully, he isn't feeling under pressure to release version 2.0 anytime soon. I am happy to not see another paper until 2026. Consequently, a hypothetical discussion (as unlikely as that is to ever happen) is irrelevant when the latter part of the paper is due to substantially change by becoming much more defined. It is possible he is forced to revert to flat Minkowski spacetime in order to make the math easier in a case uncomplicated by gravitational waves. Various techniques for SHIAB operators could be explored and a greater insight gained in this more forgiving sandbox, and then there may be inspiration as to how to formally define the SHIABs for squished spacetime and the Lagrangians will consequently firm up as they depend on one, and we might see pair of abstract equations of how things look from 14-dimensions where all symmetries are more apparent, and although elaborate and complexified, everything seems simpler mathematically speaking. It's possible this might take until version 3.0 and quantisation might need version 4.0 so we might be looking at 2034 for the final paper.

[@stretchbatchelor]

yt algorithm spun you up after listening to Randall Carlson & Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan. Go figure ;) Please continue sir. Every moment you are experiencing is a moment... only... for ... you.

[@quantumzoflyne]

the point is that most attempts to get a unified theory are done by approaching the subject from a quantum mechanics point of view trying to fit gravity into it by "quantising" something we do not have a well defined fundamental theory of besides GR which has a more stringent range of validity than quantum mechanics; yet it is not clear to me how far of those who proposed a unified theory of their own, have actually tried to find gravity within quantum mechanics, something which has been suggested by both Roger Penrose and Sean Carroll, where Roger Penrose talks about "gravitising quantum mechanics" rather than quantising gravity. However, I'd be curious to know how the here three suggested approaches would account for a suggested "gravitisation" of quantum mechanics, any thoughts?

[@cybervigilante]

I think Wolfram is right about Graphs being at the root of things, but he's going in the wrong direction - to the submicroscopic. The truth is in the opposite direction.

[@ExecutiveChefLance]

Nah they are connected directly. Waves and Energy are somehow directly related to Black Holes. You explain a Black Hole you explain Quantum Mechanisms and also vice versa. Its like they both break opposite spectrums of how we view reality.

[@Mutual_Information]

Just discovering this now. Very interesting/entertaining. You and Scott are the right people for this dissection. But where's Eric to defend himself!? I fear he may remain a no show..

[@calebromo1]

I dare you all to try and prove Salvatore Pais theory wrong through test.

[@AG-ur1lj]

Stephen said plain and simple, you can literally go on his website and click the peer review button. He made you a button to click so you can _actually refute sections of his work_ . If you know what you’re talking about, anyway.

[@determinedqubit6566]

Hmm Any chance the secret Author was Sean Carroll 🤔 maybe not since it sounded like you'd just met when he was on ur podcast some months after this was released

[@JamesNeilMeece]

Guy on the left sounds like Vitalik

[@audience2]

Wolfram, Weinstein, and similar people looking for greatness make the classical mistake of overestimating their reasoning abilities and underestimating the importance of listening to criticism.

[@matterasmachine]

it's better than to do nothing. Criticism is easy, but useless. It does not produce anything.

[@KaliFissure]

Neutron decay cosmology is inevitable. A definitive model for the universe is impossible. There are multiple models which each have their values and drawbacks. There are many ways to describe something, which is best for the conditions is the question.

[@ZapataCarratala]

I do "know" Scott...

[@TheMg49]

I've always thought that the correlations produced in quantum entanglement experiments can be understood using classical concepts. For example, two particles interact and their subsequent momenta are related via classical conservation law. The relationship holds as long as the particles aren't disturbed during their trips to the filters and detectors, and it's the locally produced relationship between the entangled particles that determines the observed correlations. The precise mechanics of this is unknown. Will advances in instrumentation and detection reveal a more or a less classical understanding of quantum entanglement? I enjoyed this video. Thanks for your work. Thumbs up and subscribed.

[@ExecutiveChefLance]

I agree but I believe it will be similar to Wolfram's "Rules". Such that there is a certain geometry or structure or nature of the Universe such that Small Things or Energy or Maybe Information itself must act as waves to propagate. And this Rule Or Nature has to be connected to Black Holes. Its like taking a Derivative where you have limits and can get multiple answers from one Function. Or add two Water Waves together. We know they Molecules but they never act as single molecules. And furthermore understanding a single Water Molecule explains nothing about the Water wave. The Wave itself is just energy. You and I both agree with Einstein's OG problem with Quantum Mechanics. WHY? If we can figure out WHY Wave-Particle duality maybe revealed as 100% logical. In fact I think it will reveal a New Type of Logic.

[@TheMg49]

@@ExecutiveChefLance What's "Einstein's OG problem with Quantum Mechanics"? Thanks.

[@JanPBtest]

12:00 Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake is a disaster because only proof-of-work can protect decentralisation. The bit about proof-of-work "wasting energy" is an old FUD by now. The way that power grids work _in real life_ is quite counterintuitive, there are good descriptions and analyses of it available, ditto for the relevant energy use. Scott definitely knows his physics but he hasn't done his homework yet re. digital currencies.

[@BL19ed]

I’ll give aaronsen this: he is very entertaining.

[@thedouglasw.lippchannel5546]

How about CIG Theory? Click on the link above. Who knows... Maybe it's right. Even if partially correct, that would be awesome! Comments are appreciated. If it isn't correct, we are back to square 1.

[@septopus3516]

Eric knows his theory is incomplete, it's at best a very imaginative conflation of spinners and Riemann geometric shapes. The theory is hollow, full of self induced inconsistencies to the point where Eric himself fumbles during his presentations. Perhaps this was just a sideways insight to the lack of imagination and stagnation in new physics.

[@stridedeck]

To explain and unite entanglement, special relativity, and quantum mechanics, would not the solution be found to be outside all of these systems? It is this outside system that crushes them all into one?

[@audiodead7302]

Agree. I am an engineer. We solve contradictions all the time. Entanglement poses the contradiction "how can particles be local and non-local at the same time?'. One solution is that they are non-local in the three dimensions of space but local in another hidden dimension (as in string theory). Another solution is that all matter/energy in the universe was once concentrated in a single space (singularity/big bang) so even though it is not local today, it was local 14 billion years ago. An engineer would call this 'separation in time'.

[@stridedeck]

@@audiodead7302 I agree and my understanding of the wave-particle duality is that a wave becomes a particle (quantum wave function) when the wave is disturbed. And according to QM, everything is a wave and when disturbed becomes what we observe as particle (an excitation of the quantum field) and loses its superposition and entanglement.

[@michaeldashnaw2503]

@@stridedeck ya!

[@locutus3009]

@@audiodead7302 just use superdeterminism. Bell inequality are irrelevant for superdeterministic universe, and there are no freedom of experiment.

[@stridedeck]

@@davidrandell2224 So then, if it is all outside, then something quite unusual, and would seem silly to us, like some Greek mythology, but be based on all scientific observations and equations. Science still do not know what the fabric of space is except it is dynamic.

[@mitchellhayman381]

Not, sure about the merit of Steven's ideas, but he seems to me to be an extremely brilliant man. Hes definitely no fool. He also seems to be extremely open minded. He seems to be really confident in his idea

[@neverusingthisagain2]

The bells experiment doesnt show the world as quantum. It shows energy that way. But that could be due to a lack of understanding of the fields in which energy travels. The word particle is kind of a misnomer when it comes to energy. To my knowledge we havent shown quantum entanglement on objects wifh mass? Am i incorrect about this ?

[@simonlopes4301]

The strength of the scientific method is also its weakness. Once non-locality was established in the 60s and 70s any model that contains an axiomatic space time is a clear dead end. But the scientific community keeps working on these models (GR, QM,...) because we have nothing else remotely solid to stand on. I'm not saying these two TOE are correct or even pointing in the right direction, but we can not refute them based on our accepted models, which are frankly house of cards right now. It seems Scott still believes we just need to tweak gravity a little to fit QM and we are done! And non-locality is just a quirk of space, with nothing much to see there.

[@brothermine2292]

It's incorrect to say the Locality axiom has been falsified (by entanglement experiments verifying violation of Bell's Inequality). But I prefer Nonlocality over the other two alternatives, which seem less plausible: Nonreality or Superdeterminism. Nonlocal phenomena seem much more plausible, given how poorly space & time are understood.

[@simonlopes4301]

@@brothermine2292 how exactly is locality not violated by non local behaviour? When you can go from A to C without ever passing by B then all bets are off. The only reason we have been able to keep working on these models after tunneling, superposition, and entanglement were formalised is because none of these states are contagious to the rest of the system. Meaning they decay to classical states very quickly so it's easy to ignore. Space time needs to be an emergent property of any new serious theory, to be able to accommodate non locality.

[@brothermine2292]

@@simonlopes4301 : The premise of your question, "nonlocal behavior," is NOT proved by the violation of Bell's inequality. A lot of people lump together two axioms that are logically separable, calling the combination Local Realism if they're being precise, or Locality if they're sloppy. That combination is what has been disproved by the Bell inequality violation. (Except for the Superdeterminism loophole, which I think is an implausible way to hang on to Local Realism.) It's best to tease apart the two Local Realism axioms and recognize that either one can hold, but not both. You might want to search for the word "realism" in the Wikipedia page about Bell's Theorem.

[@simonlopes4301]

@@brothermine2292 the axioms are the most vulnerable part of a model, if they aren't rock solid then the model has no hope. The fact that we have had to go back and put an asterisk next to them shows how fragile the whole thing is. IMHO all these brain gymnastics we have to do to square our observations with the axioms we are tied to are just patches to a sinking ship. All I am saying is that if we want a model that isn't faced with the measurement problem ( which is at the root of all non local behaviour ) then we necessarily have to go back and remove space, time, spacetime from the axiomatic foundation of the model. I understand why we keep kicking this dead cat, because there is nothing better to do, but every physicist deep down knows something is rotten in the state of Denmark. They just keep working to feed the applied science folk new data, so that the engineers dont go out of a job. But I believe GR and QM have given us all they can in the fundamental understanding of our universe

[@brothermine2292]

@@simonlopes4301 : Based on that non-answer to my question, I tentatively assume you can't identify any of "the assumptions in Bell's Theorem" that you claimed at least one must be wrong. Perhaps what you really meant in your original comment is that one of the assumptions in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (and in some other interpretations of quantum mechanics?) must be wrong. But Realism is NOT one of the assumptions in the Copenhagen interpretation. Bohr said particles don't have properties before the properties are observed. Personally, I kind of agree with you that something seems to be rotten in the foundations of QM, and that it's probably due to the Founders' firm belief in Locality (which Einstein called Separability) despite their not knowing much about the nature of space or time. I think Einstein overreached in 1905 when he said the photo-electric effect implies light is a particle, because it actually only implies the light is entirely absorbed (by an electron) when any portion of the light is absorbed. The belief in Locality -- "what happens at a location in spacetime is unaffected by everything outside the location's past lightcone" -- is what led Einstein to his "particle" conclusion, because if light is instead a wave, then a moment before the light wave is entirely absorbed by the electron, some of the wave was outside the past lightcone of the location where it is absorbed... contrary to Locality. Absorption of the entire wave, including its nonlocal portion, would solve the Measurement Problem. Collapse of the light's Schrodinger wavefunction would simply correspond to absorption of the entire wave at the electron's location. The principle should generalize to other kinds of interactions besides absorption: when part of a wave interacts at a location in spacetime, the entire quantum of the wave interacts at that location. Compton scattering was interpreted by the Founders of QM as confirmation that light is a particle. But it actually only confirmed that light isn't a *classical* wave. It didn't establish that light isn't a non-classical (quantum) wave. It's surprising to me that Einstein apparently didn't reconsider Locality and "particle or wave" after his 1935 paper on the Einstein-Rosen bridge (aka wormhole). Unfortunately, Einstein didn't live long enough to see Bell's Theorem and the experimental confirmation that nature violates Bell's inequality exactly as QM predicts. It shows that one of the axioms in the EPR Theorem must be wrong. The violation of Bell's inequality implies local hidden variable theories are wrong. But it does not imply QM is complete.

[@Alexander_Sannikov]

i really don't understand why people seem to love wolfram's theory so much. not only its consistency with known physics is practically ignored, it's not even consistent with itself. its core assumption that the order of applying "transformation rules" does not matter is a very strong assumption (that is most likely simply wrong), yet he proposes it as an axiom.

[@Tardig]

Not defending his theory per se I’m just learning about it but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t say it “doesn’t matter” just that there is no way to tell the ways in which the order of transforms happens because any attempts to track that happen within that itself

[@Alexander_Sannikov]

@@Tardig he literally proposed this hypothesis that application order of the rules "averages out" over long time. this is a very convenient assumption because it allows him to calculate them in parallel much more efficiently than otherwise. however, that assumption is obviously false in many cases, it's trivial to find infinitely many counter examples.

[@NightmareCourtPictures]

@@Alexander_Sannikov You’re just slightly confused here about the model. QM an GR are inevitable consequences of the Hypergraph structure. That so long as there is a Hypergraph doing transformations, there will be QM and GR…since in every possible graph there are branching and merging of states. So those theories emerge in all possible physics (along with energy and a few other properties irrespective of the particular Hyper-graph) It’s pretty novel because it implies that space-time and quantum mechanics are universal features of systems…that in some sense all systems have some internal notion of spacetime relativity and notions of quantum mechanics. Idk if you ever heard Wolfram make jokes from time to time where he will mention some topic he is studying and then add -space as a suffix…like “and currency would be a feature of economic-space…” or another funny one is “invention-space” They aren’t actually jokes…but a forwarding of that idea that systems following rules create these emergent notions of space within that system. Emergence is necessary for any theory that is trying to unify any of these fundamental theories…and so this is where “averaging out” becomes important. Micro scale dynamics (the branching and merging going on in the Hypergraph) have to emerge macroscopic dynamics (space as we observe it) and so there really is no other way to do that…it’s also not strange considering that this is how physics typically works and it sounds like this is new news to people with regard to the wolfram model…like do you know what temperature is in thermodynamics? That is an emergent, approximation based notion of molecular movements.

[@akshaysubramaniam8963]

Comparing wolfram and weinstein is rather unfair to the former.. weinstein is a… ‘public intellectual’

[@mitchellhayman381]

I agree. Wolfram has dedicated his life to learning mathematics and physics. I believe he has a pretty clear idea about what direction could be fruitful. He's probably wrong, but I think he'd rather know he's wrong if he is. Wolfram does what he does on his own dime and is trying to make a great advance in physical science. That's incredibly admirable.

[@Necrozene]

What? He is the Wolf man!

[@SuperChrisDub]

The problem with Weinstein's theory is that it can't predict anything - which is kind of a problem. The problem with Weinstein himself is his collosal ego - which is kind of a problem. (I was going to use "kinda" when I remembered I was among fellow nerds not in the Bro-sphere!)

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

At best we are probably explaining human perspective of the universe. Our own psyche. 😆 Our language is not random we definitely designed it numbers and math included to be an aproximinate instrument to use in studying our world and conveying it to others. Nothing about it is random or preferred by the universe. In fact if AI was sentient and able to Speak true universal language it would not use our language. if it did prefer our code over anything else that would indicate way more than evolutionary randomized views.

[@aminomar7890]

Eric read something somewhere (not his thoughts) only thy the owner of the thoughts can explain them (human thoughts never come from nothing!)

[@griffith500tvr]

What is the difference between Eric Weinstein's field of expertise and Timothy's? Have they both studied the same mathematical theories or is Eric's knowledge deeper in for example geometric mathematics? I ask this question because scientists will often have a hunch of what certain solutions could be before they get to prove it mathematically.

[@Bizarro69]

What's the point of theories of everything anyway.

[@phulcq6716]

What's the point of any theory?

[@michaelshields6326]

To become gods in their own minds. It's seems really arrogant to me to think you could actually create a theory of everything.

[@wetguavass]

to create anything you can think of

[@chrisrecord5625]

Good Will Hunting: Will hoped to remain unknown😉😉

[@joshua3171]

Everyone's got a little Toey 😁

[@brothermine2292]

I have two little toes.

[@eleanorblake697]

The examples in a new kind of science are fun and exciting but the book is so grandiose its hard to take seriously lol

[@JonasWeezer]

Reinvent physics.

[@thoribass696]

When two slap each other on the back

[@aleratz]

You know

[@Calidastas]

We need people like this guy talking to the public. We keep ending up with pop sci communicators that spew BS to elevate their status and profile. Then they suffer from generating click bait videos on top of it and the next thing you know we’re getting even more BS.

[@elontusk1168]

I’d be more impressed if these guys produced what was necessary to make GU a more rigorous (colloquial) theory. Currently Eric is trying to softball the uap community into believing his theory is what is missing with regard to post einsteinian physics

[@SunShine-xc6dh]

Whats so special about bells theorem classic polarized light behaves the exact same way

[@bb-andersenaccount9216]

you know...

[@AndersHansgaard]

There's a bit of a difference between making this and that simple program as a kid and publishing a rigorous work like A New Kind of Science. And it's not that Wolfram presents the fundamentals of that publication as something totally new and undiscovered - but again: Rigor is the key. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram doesn't set out to come up with a new foundation for physics. Very, very far from it. At the very end of the book he ruminates about where the idea of computation might lead and there are very short chapters about biology, intelligence, physics and so on. To say that 'Aaronson's review of Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"' is very, very far off point.

[@Kannot2023]

Theories are symplifications and they can't cover everything

[@jonathansachs1979]

godel's incompleteness theorem was good enough for Hawking, so its good enough for me.

[@asdf-mg7tu]

That's appealing to authority which I keep telling people that it isn't a fallacy if the people arguing are totally clueless. There are better more comprehensive proofs which would take years for us amateurs to fully understand.

[@jonathansachs1979]

@@asdf-mg7tu sometimes logical fallacies are true. At least I conceptually understand Godel's theorem and appears to be a show stopper for TOE. Gage theory? not a clue.

[@jonathansachs1979]

@@asdf-mg7tu sometimes logical fallacies are true. At least I conceptually understand Godel's theorem and appears to be a show stopper for TOE. Gage theory? not a clue.

[@drdca8263]

@@jonathansachs1979 It is spelled "gauge theory". Also, Gödel's incompleteness theorem does not imply that a TOE can't be found in any possible universe. It is entirely possible to have a program produce a copy of its source code as part of the data it operates on. However, I wouldn't entirely rule out that the incompleteness theorems may, uh, well, point to a reason why it might be possible that it is impossible for us to find a TOE. So, it might be ("might be" as in, "as far as I know") that in some logically consistent hypothetical universes, that it isn't possible to discover (and demonstrate with high confidence) the exact laws of physics of that hypothetical universe within that hypothetical universe, and specifically that this being impossible could be due to incompleteness, or that the existence-as-a-possibile-hypothetical of such a hypothetical universe was in some other way a consequence of incompleteness. But, I'm pretty sure that isn't true of all logically consistent hypothetical universes in which questions of "what are the laws of physics?" could be formulated by entities within it. (And perhaps in the actual universe a TOE can't be found, but, we can't conclude that from incompleteness by itself, I think.)

[@phulcq6716]

@@jonathansachs1979 why would Godel be a showstopper for any TOE?

[@shakdidagalimal]

Ok, I listened twice and there's a big problem I have with TN. When it comes to quantum mechanics and their constant giggling celebration of duality and spooky action at a distance and not knowing the unknowable state and position, one realizes it's all a big phony world and mental gymnastics game of absolutely nothing at all. That's why we have completely pathetic "quantum computers" that get around the with the same fudges and flaws and declare some super position in the discovery of reality. SA pointed out a math error in Eric's theory, however that is the least of our problems in theoretical physics whereby the math itself is completely divorced from physical reality and has no corresponding connection to it in almost it's entirety. This is a continuing "thought experiment" and when you check real world physical experimental results you find when you dig in just a bit it is the same glossed over vague and fuzzy extrapolations of word games and their concepts presented as miracles of paradox with grossly incorrect conclusions presented in generally unknown definitional hype esoteric enough to leave astounding perceptions completely off base with the reality of the very physical systems used as example to prop up the thought experiments as confirmed and true. This is WHY people like Wolfram can come into the space and present entire rewrites of the totality of the quantum theories. I know of single individual who I believe has made enormous headway in correcting the gigantic base error assumptions and misinterpretations going all the way back to Newton and moving through Einstein. Of course anything not mainstream, which is riddled with errors and fudges and constant liars at the top, is ridiculed as quackery. We have a powerful emperor caste who is not fully naked but is definitely wearing rotten tiny threadbare rags that giggles and smirks and makes known false assertions concerning their own base of "proven science" that is riddled with falsehoods they have all maintained for decades while they attack alternate thinkers dressed as well as themselves. It's a long time coming, a house cleaning and honesty, and frankly I believe half the court jesters in power don't even know that their garb is barely visible.

[@aminomar7890]

similar to many other……!

[@____uncompetative]

Continued... Nguyen was annoyed that his "response" wasn't accepted to the arXiv e-print server because it cited timestamps within a fuzzy KZbin video where he had guessed what Dr Weinstein had written on the blackboard whilst standing in the way of the camera seeing him write on it, consequently omitting some important subscripts from his transcription, amongst other flaws, although there was feedback from the audience which helped him correct some of these minor oversights as can be seen from the video (note: the timestamp has been selected to skip the introduction): kzbin.info/www/bejne/kGjVlWNqgN9_mck This presentation is far from being the ideal way to comprehend his ideas, which is why that video had a supplemental slide explainer attached to it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/kGjVlWNqgN9_mck Here some of the notation changes from the lecture, as noted on the slide that says: "Most fields, (omega), are dancing on Y (called U in the Lecture) but are observed via pull-back as if on X." or the later slide that notes "This is not the Full Theory. This is simply a first attempt to break off a piece and try to present it." He admits he has "no idea if it is remotely correct". See this timestamp: kzbin.info/www/bejne/kGjVlWNqgN9_mck Nguyen admitted to Robert Wright that he gave up reading Dr Weinstein's draft paper on _Geometric Unity:_ kzbin.info/www/bejne/oGmZiHych8uDes0m48s "I didn't look at it that carefully..." This is bizarre to me. Someone who rushed his ""Response"" out prematurely _ahead_ of the publication of the paper he sought to respond to because he "wanted to steal his thunder" comes off as malicious, with it flouting the established protocol of allowing a paper to be published before responding to it, and then allowing the author of that paper plenty of time to respond to your own response, and not harassing them or shaming them for not immediately responding to your response (which wasn't in this case even to their 2021 paper, but an out of date video from 2013). It's pathetic, and I suspect Tim is autistic or in some way socially challenged, as all this is not evidence of good manners. If I were to seek an more charitable interpretation of Tim's actions (and ignore what he said), then it is equally bizarre as you would expect someone who is genuinely keen to rush out a response to a video outlining an idea, would want to read the whole of the 69 page paper detailing the draft version of that idea in a more mature form; benefiting from an additional eight years of refinement yet still containing errors (such as the symbol _H_ being used to denote two different objects, which is kinda embarrassing as Tim is having the final word on something that he didn't read which is nowhere close to being finished yet as it has notational errors that will be rectified in future working drafts, and this exposes an assumption that _Geometric Unity_ is a paper like any other paper Tim might find on the arXiv, or one that has gone through an academic process of peer review; it has not; that is why there are two email addresses on the first page inviting general and technical feedback which Tim ought to have used rather than publish his transparent attempt to rubbish this work in progress before anyone had had an opportunity to make their own judgement about it). If I were to be really charitable and only look at his response to the Oxford lecture (and ignore the fact that this material is out of date, as it is not the current version of _Geometric Unity_ as seen in the draft paper), then what ought to have been labelled Equation (2.10) which is the last equation in §2.3 on page 5 of his paper _A Response to Geometric Unity_ is incorrect. Clicking the 13 takes you to the endnotes showing the timestamps of the sections within the Oxford lecture at which it was written on the blackboard: 13. 1:43:35 Only this wasn't written on the blackboard. If you hit pause as soon as you click on this you will see the whole equation that Eric wrote without the omissions Tim made in his transcription: kzbin.info/www/bejne/kGjVlWNqgN9_mck Tim omitted the ε and π subscripts from the terms within the square brackets. Also, he irritatingly refers to the "shiab" operator when it is the "SHIAB" operator as it is an acronym which stands for "Ship In A Bottle". There are but four bullet point flaws found in Eric's 69 page draft, the first of which wouldn't have needed to have been written had he waited for Weinstein's own remarks which acknowledges remain to be formally defined in future drafts (on page 42). The second bullet also misses its mark as _Geometric Unity_ isn't using a Spin(14) bundle, but a Spin(14, ℂ) bundle, but I guess that's what comes of being impatient and not waiting to respond to the actual paper. The third bullet misses its mark due to Eric's remarks at the end of §12.8 essentially dismissing the idea and arguing that the supercharges may _already be here_ subsumed in the form of the ν and ζ fields as this would not be space-time supersymmetry in the generally established sense of the term, with a footnote which remarks that "The author finds supersymmetry unnecessarily confusing as an as-if symmetry and is uncomfortable saying much more about it." so he is hardly pro-supersym by the sounds of this YMMV. The fourth and final bullet in Tim's gun is fair, as _Geometric Unity_ in its current form omits sufficient details, due to not yet being quantised by a theoretical physicist to leave many of the central claims unverifiable... "Our conclusion is that, even supposing the previous technical concerns could be addressed, the volume of missing or inexplicit computations renders the formulation of GU largely incomplete." Yes, that is why it is subtitled _Author's Working Draft, v 1.0_ rather than _A Unified Field Theory_ or a _A Final Theory_ or _The Theory of Everything_ as it is largely incomplete, seeking feedback. Did Tim give any feedback to the draft? No. He whined to Robert Wright that he stopped reading when Eric admitted he had lost his notes on the SHIAB operator. Which means he missed the part where Eric said he would reconstruct it in future drafts. This is why _Geometric Unity_ is a work in progress. We are seeing a paper being worked on in public, and seek feedback through email from anyone who is interested in improving it. Tim isn't interested in providing general or technical feedback through these channels, and sought to piss on it from a great height by getting his paper published on arXiv, only they were sensible to reject it because it was based off a video of a lecture he did not attend and which he transcribed incorrectly, undermining all of his claims as he isn't criticising the same equations. Eric will keep working on _Geometric Unity_ and this parasite will lose all relevance and be seen as the grifter he is, stealing the work of Eric's wife to make content out of on his shitty KZbin channel. He may not be able to explain himself to Robert Wright that well because it could be that his anonymous coward of a collaborator helped him understand the other half of the paper which has nothing to do with his limited specialisation in gauge theory. Tim isn't in a position, qualification wise to critique the whole of _Geometric Unity_ so we only got these three misfires and one bullet point that is easily countered by the defence that it is an incomplete draft. Google might want to examine how professional his work is, and whether he is stealing the work of others without attribution as he did with Eric's wife, or supplementing his lack of knowledge with the help of his boyfriend.

[@TimothyNguyen]

I strongly encourage you to distribute your critique of my work as widely as possible (why limit yourself to a KZbin comment?) so that it can convince all who have been misled by my response paper. Speaking for myself at least, your pseudonymity is irrelevant in this matter. May your confidence in Geometric Unity and Eric's work in progress serve you well. Best wishes.

[@____uncompetative]

@@TimothyNguyen As you can see I was unable to post my long comment here as as series of replies to myself to overcome KZbin's 10,000 character limit. So I have posted my response to your response as the second comment on my video entitled: _Geometric _*_Unity_* explained in under 2 minutes kzbin.info/www/bejne/rYfPdaKIlKqAhsk I recommend that you read through all 69 pages of Mr Weinstein's initial draft paper as you may find something else that is of concern to you. Whether or not you use the provided emails for general and technical feedback or post your response on your blog I will leave to your discretion. However, I do consider the 2021 draft paper to be more substantial than the 2013 Oxford University lecture that you based your response on, so if you are still interested you might want to give his draft paper a detailed analysis. Alternatively, it is not long until April, so it could be the case that we will get version 2.0 of his _Author's Working Draft_ as he is apparently still working on it. geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric_Unity-Draft-April-1st-2021.pdf

[@DanielDurham121]

You did not even come close to refuting virtually any of Stephen Wolfram's work.

[@KitagumaIgen]

Wolfram should've been considered as falsified just from the sheer number of times writing the name of his software product. Or be forced to pay each and everyone 1€ for each mention to everyone buying his drivel-compendium.

[@vogarner]

"I have a theory of everything and academia won't take it seriously so academia has failed " is such a classic "crackpot" trope. 😂

[@KaliFissure]

I suggest a hydrodynamic model, with space a dielectric fluid of variable density from Lambda, to a bit past neutron. Charge is caused by the flow of the dielectric fluid of space, just like in any dielectric fluid. For example, a proton has mass, which causes a convergence of space, creating positive charge, which is convergence. And negative charge is divergence of flow. This makes room for curl being a of a fundamentally different level, the Aharonov Bohm effect. And neutrinos. Look up Hydrodynamic Solution to Schrodinger Equation on arxiv

[@zeven341]

The interpretation of Bell’s theorem by Aaronson is incorrect. Bell proved non-locality but not proved the impossibility of hidden variables, as e.g Tim Maudlin explained. (Quote: It is clear that this was Bell’s understanding of the situation as well. “On the Einstein-Podolosky-Rosen paradox” begins thus [1] 14: The paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen was advanced as an argument that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory but should be supplemented by additional variables. These additional variables were to restore to the theory causality and locality. In this note, that idea will be formulated and shown to be incompatible with the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. It is the requirement of locality, or more precisely, that the result of an experiment on one system be unaffected by operations on a distant system with which it has interacted in the past, that creates the essential difficulty. Note that Einstein’s aim was to restore causality (i.e. determinism) and locality, features both absent in the standard theory. And note also that the real sticking point is locality. Determinism can, in fact, be restored while keeping the same predictions, as the pilot wave theory shows. But locality-in the sense Bell articulates, which is Einstein’s sense-cannot be restored even in a deterministic theory. Locality must be abandoned in either case.) Bell himself mentions the pilot-wave theory is a possibility for restoring determinism. In any case the debate is still going on.

[@zeven341]

@@davidrandell2224I read the paper by Mortenson. I can’t judge this. It is not peer-reviewed and the math is completely insufficient

[@JonasWeezer]

Ich bin ein ouslander.

[@PrinceBlake]

Some quick thoughts (15:35 = 935 seconds) on the quantum state.(9:35). On my desk is a laptop. a calculator, a bottle of water, a pair of glasses, some books, a lamp, and a fan. Seconds later, on my desk is a laptop. a calculator, a bottle of water, a pair of glasses, some books, a lamp, and a fan. A minute later on my desk is a laptop. a calculator, a bottle of water, a pair of glasses, some books, a lamp, and a fan. If we break down this time into quantum units we must assume that whatever is going on within the wavefunctions of these objects, they are faithfully retaining the objects on my desk with no visible changes to them. In other words, they are faithfully regenerating the architecture of the water, the plastic bottle surrounding it, the electronics inside the laptop - everything is being reproduced into each consecutive moment of now with great reliability. It's so reliable that we can build bridges knowing they won't fall down if we design them soundly. We can manufacture planes knowing they will withstand the stress of turbulence. We can build all these complicated things because of one reliable thing that has a beginning and ending in its expansion and its arrival to an orbit where a new expansion is born precisely the same dimension as its parents. What is the driving force behind this constant refresh rate of new generation expansions? The dipole moment. It's the closest point of return between the ever-expanding and orbital paths. At the north pole there is a convergence of lines and at the south pole there is an emergence of an offspring wave, replacing its parent wave to produce one generation wave after another in rapid succession, The lie is that electrons last very nearly forever. The truth is more closely arrived at to say they have an infinite number of lives. The wavefunction is an excellent relay race team. The expansion is represented by the sum of the expanding cross intervals from origin to orbit (935) and the orbit is represented by the sum of its 5 vertices two of which overlap (505) The overlapping location is represented by 77|125. The location of the Higgs Boson was measured at 125GeV. and has been described as what gives waves their mass. It's another way of saying its the location where a wave is regenerated as a result of the dipole moment. My wife and I have been receiving many signs helping us to discern this architecture and also helping us to recognize patterns conducive to avoiding war and improving our technologies for a sustainable future. All indications are that humanity is at its beginning point on Earth as far as the geologic time-scale is concerned. We are at its relative infancy. It hardly makes sense to talk about the End-Times unless its a catastrophe of our own making. That said, it is wise to consider the threats posed by comets and large asteroids but also to take care not to miscalculate. The Institut Quantif has honored my wife with the first--ever Noble Prize (not to be confused with the more famous Alfred Nobel Prize) in Physics for her discovery of Mathwave 935. I'd like to thank Christ 935-505 and the spirit of Rene Descartes for their assistance. When Prince Harry was first home-shopping in America, I was impressed with his choice in Meghan and with the maturity he showed in his choice to move to America. As an American man, I was concerned about the negative press attention he was receiving in England and the extent it was being carried over into America through the tabloids. As a breath of fresh air from the tabloid noise, I thought at that time, and still do, that it might be a good idea to involve the royal brothers William and Harry and the brothers Weinstein in a joint project promoting the brotherhood of Man through the uniting of Weinstein's Geometric Unity, representing the West with Mrs. Kerch's Arrow of Time, representing the East. There is also a convergence of religious symbolism implied by the model and the likelihood the discovery will appeal uniquely to many diverse cultures in its own way. I see this discovery as an extension of Lady Di's healing and humanitarian work.

[@williambunting803]

Here is another “theory” to refute, and I would appreciate your tearing it apart so I can see the flaws. To my thinking the source of Gravity is right there in front of us. That there is a terminal speed for light and energy moving through space is the clue. The only assumption here is that there is a mechanism to do this. The fact that elevating larger masses of matter towards the speed of light both requires an exponential amount of energy proves that there is a mechanism at work here, it is not just that photons can only work this way. The Higgs experiment also demonstrates that there is an energy mechanism that if hit hard enough will produce a particle like thing. I am going to speculate that the mechanism is a closed string energy field called the Higgs Field and that is a form of static energy, ie doesn’t move around as photons and electrons do. The other form of energy Dynamic Energy, Energy that if you smash it open the energy blasts off in straight lines and/or forms other smaller particles. Pulling those clues together Matter Energy or Dynamic Energy when moving through the Higgs Field requires ever greater energy thereby effectively increasing its mass E=M>C^2. This is the outside in experience of Energy in the Higgs Field, but there is also the Inside out version which is in the form of Protons and Neutrons where a quantity of Energy is acting on the Field and trapped by it but unable to escape due to the Higgs Mechanism of limiting the speed of energy moving, or attempting to, move through it. This is precisely what we understand Protons and Neutrons to be. Energy Quanta bound tightly together in the form of Quarks with immense energy which we call the Strong Nuclear Force. Physics would say the the Field is Uniform and Universal permeating all of Space. I speculate that Matter Energy excludes the Field to react with it in an outward direction. So Particles are Energy contained by the field to react with the Higgs Field to create an energy reaction zone we call the Strong Nuclear Force, but in this model that energy reaction barrier is 100% elastic ie no energy is consumed, and that energy reaction effect dissipates away from the nucleus of the particle exponentially (the square of the distance). So around every Proton and Neutron is a Field Energy Gradient which at distance affects other Particles where Particles move away from the lowest Field Energy Level in Deep Space towards other Particles with a higher surrounding Energy Level Gradient, and this is what we experience as Gravity. So the Strong Nuclear Force and Gravity are the same phenomenon. Time Dilation is achieved by speed in open space, as the speed increases towards the speed of light time slows for that body, or by Field Energy Level up to the particle Proton and Neutron light speed Boundary Zone. How can this be tested? The theory is that Dynamic Energy operating at light speed or above Reacts with the Higgs Static Energy Field increasing its energy level so other energy moving through the field is deflected away from the lowest field energy level towards the highest (Matter). This would suggest that if a laser light beam intersected the Proton Beam in the LHC chamber, as the Protons built up energy this should increase the Higgs Field Energy level and deflect the Laser in the direction of the curved Proton Beam as the Protons reach 99.999% of the speed of light. If this were true then the “theory” make predictions for Dark Energy and Dark Matter. That is a crude description of the idea but the essential content is their.

[@bryandraughn9830]

Computer scientist and mathematician critique physics and giggle a lot. This is entertainment in reverse.

[@darwinlaluna3677]

Its amazing ryt?

[@TimothyOBrien6]

Also glad Scott mentions both sides of the anonymous co-author issue. Timothy, if that's Eric's only reason for not considering the paper, maybe your co-author should publicly stand behind his or her work. It does feel a bit sketchy and it precludes a direct conversation about the paper.

[@TimothyNguyen]

You could certainly email my co-author with your opinion on this issue (or as a matter of fact, so could Eric and more relevantly, on any scientific concerns about the paper, as Scott points out).

[@TimothyOBrien6]

@@TimothyNguyen ok, I will. I would hate to see your work not be considered because of silliness (doesn't matter who is "at fault")

[@danscieszinski4120]

Wasn’t the underlying philosophy in that anime movie in the 90s Ghost in the Shell basically positing the same thing as Wolfram? It from bit? Also, why does the term ‘branchial space’ not invoke many worlds, it’s the same concept just different words. He seems to be the opposite of a Platonist… the math isn’t describing metaphysical spaces, it’s just math, abstract, not real. I feel it holds him in place.

[@1ifemare]

If by "the same thing" you mean Wolfram, Wheeler and Oshii are tangentially connected in their wildly different subjects by an extremely thin philosophical thread, then sure. Shakespeare and Botticelli are the same thing. It is many worlds, Wolfram himself concedes that, with one crucial difference: branches split but they also merge. Nothing in the Everettian interpretation suggests anything like that - though it does not exclude it explicitly (so one could conceive a modified MW that is completely consistent with branchial behavior). Check Sean Carroll's talk with Wolfram, they discuss this specifically. Your last statement regarding math, platonism, metaphycial spaces, reality and abstraction is just confusing...