In this medium-decoding episode, Matt and Chris turn their attention to an unlikely venue for cutting-edge theoretical physics: Piers Morgan Uncensored. There, Eric Weinstein, renegade genius and uber guru, squares off with Sean Carroll, an actual physicist and popular science communicator, in what might generously be called a “debate.”Eric brings his usual mix of personality-focused historical revisionism, intentional technobabble, and performative outrage, complete with a conspiratorial tale of how physics was hijacked in 1983 by a single lecture (that Eric was naturally present at) and how Eric is the unacknowledged creator of Seiberg-Witten equations. Sean Carroll, meanwhile, does his best to explain in simple terms how scientific research works, what is lacking in Eric's 'theory', and why appearing on podcasts is not a replacement for publishing papers and peer review.Expect to hear one academic earnestly trying to summarise complex scientific topics, while one culture war celebrity / professional podcast guest decries how he has been constantly maligned, silenced, misunderstood, and generally ignored by the mainstream scientific establishment. And just when you think it is all over, prepare to be astounded by Piers Morgan's ultimate argument for God...SourcesPiers Morgan Uncensored: “Don’t Talk About Physics Fight Club” Eric Weinstein vs Sean Carroll Science SHOWDOWNEric's Geometric Unity paperTim Nguyen & Theo Polya's Response to Geometric UnityCurt Jaimungal: Eric Weinstein's Theory of Everything "Geometric Unity" ExplainedDecoding the Gurus: Mick West & Eric Weinstein: UFO Tango
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer.
And there should be an asterisk next to that phrase.
And we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
I'm the psychologist from Australia.
He's Chris Kavanagh.
He is the anthropologist from Japan, formerly Northern Ireland.
And today is...
Because we're just monitoring, we're keeping an eye on the discourse.
It's neither fish nor fowl, Chris.
It's too big for supplementary materials.
Too big for a little item there.
But too small for a full episode.
So here we are, in the nether regions.
That's right.
Our white wheel has re-emerged.
His head has popped through the surface and the Weinsteinian air hole has...
Yeah, and a lot of people have been commenting, whenever this kind of thing happens, we get tagged in a million times of, oh, look, it's Eric.
It's Eric.
You guys, you've got to cover Eric.
And it's like, I guess we do.
I guess we do.
He's ours.
Leave him alone.
That's right.
Carter's turn sets sail for the whale.
He's ours.
Stay away.
We saw him first.
Yeah, and he's...
He scored very low, perhaps the lowest, according to Guru's history today.
But so it's two people that we've covered before.
We haven't covered Piers Morgan, and nor do I want to.
But yeah, so just saying, Matt, it's in our Bali week.
As we like to say.
Do you know what a Ballywick is?
No.
Does it sound kind of medieval castle?
I don't know what a Ballywick is either.
It sounds like a Bailey or who knows.
It sounds medieval, doesn't it?
One slight warning for you, Matt, before you move on.
It's an important one.
I know Old Squeaky is over there, right?
But I just want to tell you.
Don't get too comfortable with your current one.
You're moving around, and this guy is also, he's not good.
He's not good, okay?
If you move around too much, he's quickie.
This guy could probably do with some oil, because he'll probably be able to recover, whereas the other one magically cannot.
So I'm just warning you, don't get cocky.
This is not, just to be clear to all the listeners, this is not the most creaky chair.
Is over in the corner.
Matt already changed at the start.
But this is not the new chair, which has no creaks.
It's just left the room.
So we're in medium creek zone.
So I'm just warning you, Matt, not to roll around too much.
Okay?
That's all.
That's good.
No, it's good.
It's a good discussion.
I shouldn't be moving around too much anyway.
I should stay in front of the microphone.
Before we get into our white whale, Chris, I got to mention a little thing my wife told me about.
And I think it's a nice little example of how general the guru phenomenon, how universal, cross-culturally.
So she was listening to some, she got recommended some random Japanese financial influencer type person.
You know what I mean?
How to get rich and, you know, retire early or, I don't know, fill your tax.
I don't know.
Tell me more.
That's great.
So she started.
Listen to it just randomly.
And then she progressively got irritated with him and it transformed into hate listening, basically what you do on a daily basis.
And she started fact-checking him and all of these things.
So his thing is he was traveling around Australia and he's reporting back.
And he had all of these claims.
For instance, he was saying, you know, life in Australia for Australians is so much better than Japan.
You know, it's basically really unfair.
We're all getting ripped off and hard done by back home in Japan.
But, you know, he made a bunch of specific claims.
Firstly, the tax rates in Australia are so much lower than Japan.
And Michiko went, uh, really?
So she started checking this stuff.
Turns out, uh-uh, not really.
Turns out, you know, he claims that people are so much richer in Australia, make so much more money than in Japan.
And especially after you normalize for cost of living, uh-uh, not so much.
Very close, actually.
He says that the tax rates in Australia are so much lower than Japan.
No, again, not true.
Everyone retires at 55, also false.
It goes on, it goes on.
But the interesting thing to me was that, like, his shtick was, like, he was, like, basically speaking to a Japanese audience in Japanese, and it felt right.
And I can understand why all of the claims and the story that he was weaving would feel true.
To a Japanese audience, you know, Australia is this sort of slightly exotic country.
It makes sense, right?
That Australians are taking it easy.
They're living the good life.
Poor old us.
We have to work so hard.
We're taxed too much.
It's very unfair.
And, you know, so it's appealing to that sense of grievance, that sense of being hard done by, you know, I see the emotional appeal of it and it feels truthy.
So yeah, I just think it's interesting.
I think, you know, sometimes when we cover a guru that is sort of politically, I don't know, a hot topic in our culture, whether it's Gary's economics or Jordan Peterson or whatever, people's pre-existing opinions about the topic just sort of get in the way.
And you can't just sort of look underneath and go, well, psychosocially or emotionally, what's going on here?
You can see it when it's a Japanese influencer talking a bit to Japanese people because we're looking at it from the outside.
We don't care, right?
It's not our problem and we can notice it.
So yeah, I think these are useful things.
Yeah, the universality of curiosity.
I concur that they are existing in every culture and appealing to particular narratives, but I think a lot of the similar techniques apply just slightly.
Adjust it according to whatever cultural mores there are.
That's right.
The details change from place to place, but there'll be some target, someone who's treating you badly, someone who's ripping you off, and there'll be a feeling of grievance, and there'll be a nice, truthy kind of narrative, and just don't check the statistics.
Just don't fact check it, and it'll be very appealing to you.
Go with your vibes.
Well, that is an interesting report, Matt.
I appreciate that.
Now, to turn to the meat of this medium-sized decoding, we are looking at Don't Talk About Physics Fight Club.
Eric Weinstein vs.
Sean Carroll Science Showdown.
That speaks to, like, Piers Morgan's tabloid origins.
This is from Piers Morgan Uncensored, his YouTube show.
So, Piers Morgan.
Brought together two of the most important physics minds of the modern era to be at important issues in physics.
And what better place, Matt, than on YouTube on Piers Morgan's show for that.
So this was an interesting conversation, Matt, and I have both listened to it.
And I'm going to dive in, unless you object.
No, no, take us through it.
Some have said that this is a little bit like Eric Weinstein's debate with...
Yes.
Standing in for Mick West as the normal human being is Sean Carroll.
And Eric, reportedly, is doing the same old tricks.
But you be the judge, gentle listeners.
You be the judge.
Yes, we may have a couple of clips to illustrate that.
Let's see.
But in any case, this is Eric Weinstein and Sean Carroll.
So the start, I'm just going to play.
We're going to go through this mostly chronologically, mostly, because it's, I think, the best way to approach it.
But it starts off with Sean Carroll being asked by Piers to outline various things in physics.
And this little clip has both that and also Piers trying to, like, Piers feels like the kind of guy at the school shouting, fight, fight, fight, to try and tee things up.
Yes, so pay attention here to the way Sean responds to Pierre's provocation and also his general communication style, because I think it's going to be a good contrast as we move on.
What is your main bone of contention with Eric Weinstein?
You should probably ask Eric that.
I mean, I'm a working physicist.
I am a professor in a physics department.
I write physics papers.
I have found myself in the awkward and unenviable position of defending the establishment heterodoxy.
Like, it's never what I imagined I would be doing.
But there's good reasons why the heterodoxy is the heterodoxy.
I think that academic physics, even though I'm happy to disagree with certain choices they make about what to work on and what emphasis to put on there, is working in good faith.
I think that we're trying our best to understand the universe at a deep level.
String theory, which we'll talk about in the program, is one example of this.
I have my...
And if someone else comes up with a better idea, they'll move what they're doing and focus on that idea.
just hasn't happened yet.
I feel like Sean is very much a kindred spirit to us, Chris, because his representation there of the...
And I think you would if you were describing anthropology.
I could talk for hours about, you know, I've got lots of criticisms of it.
There's lots of things, in my opinion, they could do differently.
There's a wide variety of approaches.
There's certain things we've definitely gotten wrong and we need to do better.
But ultimately, I think it's a bunch of people doing their best.
Yeah.
I might have some stronger criticisms for mainstream anthropology.
Yeah, actually, I'd probably be more critical of psychology than Sean would be of physics, but rightly so, I think.
Yeah, but in general, you know, his approach there is like, yeah, I'm a physicist.
I work there.
I'm interested in things.
I have agreements and disagreements about various topics.
That's all.
And when he was invited to, you know, express like what is the issue with Eric Weinstein.
Is he didn't take the bait, right?
He was like, well, you can ask Eric whatever he's upset with there.
But so this is also, this is still Sean Carroll.
I thought this was, again, a nice, neat illustration to start off with.
He's asked about what is string theory.
a fairly complicated physics concept to wrap your head around, I think.
And let's hear how Sean goes at trying to explain that to For those with smaller brain power than you, what is string theory?
That's a great question.
And in fact, very famous string theorist, Joe Polczynski, wrote a very influential paper called What is String Theory?
Decades after string theory started being a popular theory to think about, and the fact is we still don't know yet.
It's an approach.
You start with a very simple idea that instead of the universe being made of particle-like things at the fundamental level, like the electron being a point-like particle, the photon, etc., which we all knew wasn't exactly right anyway, but we can talk about that later, replace that with a little loop of vibrating string.
Now, why would you do that?
There's a prehistory that goes into features of the strong interactions that motivated people to do it.
They looked at this idea.
What if the world were made of little loops of string rather than point particles?
Problematically, the theory kept failing at what they were trying to do with it, which is explain the strong nuclear force, because it kept predicting the existence of gravity.
So eventually, people said, well, wait a minute.
Gravity exists.
Maybe this is a theory of gravity as well.
And after many, many years of hard work on the part of people who were otherwise ignored by the community, they showed that it's actually a very successful theory of gravity and possibly everything else.
You have to buy a lot of extra stuff, like extra dimensions of space-time that we don't see and so forth, what is called the holographic principle, which again, we could get into if you want to.
But the theory keeps moving forward while at the same time utterly failing to connect directly with experiments.
So this has caused, you know, a lot of hair pulling among the physics community.
The theory looks very promising, but we haven't actually been able to put it to work to connect to the real world.
Nice little overview there.
Yeah, I thought this was a neat, like, little explainer, right?
Like, because it's pitched at a level that I can follow, right?
And it also highlights what the issue is, like, why there's controversy around it, because it's got this stuff that it does well.
But it has these issues which make it, like, subject to criticism.
And, yeah, so, you know, he's not providing, like, a glowing, hegiographic account of it.
He's just saying, well, this is why lots of physicists believe in it as a, you know, explanatory framework.
And, yeah, but there are issues.
Yeah, I think it's very challenging to be a science communicator when your science is theoretical physics.
Right?
Like, that's got to be difficult because, you know, it is incredibly complicated.
So you have to pitch it at exactly the right level.
And I think Sean Carroll just does a great job, especially when he's only got like 30 seconds or so to do it.
He speaks very clearly and just, like you said, he's not trying to spin it one way or the other.
No, it's quite, it's like information dense, right?
And the other thing about it is peers, and I think in general this is the way people act around physics people,
That he's deliberately making things complicated because you poor little pea-brained.
Or simple.
Deliberately making things simple.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's good.
We're hearing from Sean.
We're hearing from Sean.
Well, that's Sean.
So we've set up.
All good so far.
Yeah, all good.
Then let's turn to Eric, right?
So now it's Eric's turn to start off, right, and give his account.
So that's kind of Sean's account of the...
It's a bit different.
I mean, I can tell you why the lead tweet in my Twitter feed is assume a traversable cosmos.
If Einstein is left in force, my claim is that there are only two rocks that Elon's chemical rockets can get us to and that we have allowed ourselves to fall into the mists.
Understanding of Einstein's theory as the map of gravity rather than the territory of where we actually live.
I don't think we live in space-time at all.
And, Pierce, I just need to get to one further thing, which is that the really significant problem, I would say I am the only person in Generation X to have actually been present in the room.
When everything shifted towards string theory, which happened in 1983 at the University of Pennsylvania, when a fellow named Edward Witten gave the first lecture that I think he ever did publicly on string theory.
And his will and his mind were so powerful and his influence so completely commanding that the entire sociology of the field turned on a dime in 83 and 84. As such, I think I'm essentially the only person in Generation X who saw the old culture of physics become the new culture of physics.
And what I claim is that Sean and I probably aren't that divided even on the mathematics of string theory.
Where we are bitterly divided is that I believe that Sean thinks that the system works pretty well.
I would say he's part of the two cheers for the institutions.
Meaning that he has a to-be-sure paragraph saying that the institutions undoubtedly have their problems and wish things could be done better, whereas I see an absolute collapse in the ethics, efficacy, productivity of this at our deepest levels.
And if you're thinking about dark energy, dark matter, dark chemistry, all of the things that physics has done, essentially our modern world has been built by physicists.
Even molecular biology and the Internet come out of physicists and CERN, respectively.
With the World Wide Web.
So if you think about the impact of physics, more or less, the story of physics is the story of the world economy in the modern era.
Yeah, quite different.
Quite different in tone and content.
Yeah, yeah.
So Eric's history is very personality-focused, right?
It's Edward Witten.
And not only that, but Eric was in the room at that.
Moment, you know, when the whole field shifted and he's the only one perhaps that observed it.
Yeah, it turned on a dime and it was all to do with these characters, mainly Edward Witten, which we have to remind listeners.
I'm not sure if it's entirely clear or not, but it seems pretty clear that Eric Weinstein has taken credit for coming up with the Witten equations.
The Seberg-Witten equations.
Thank you.
Yes, this is true.
He has claimed that.
He's claimed that he developed them first and then was discouraged from pursuing them.
And then later, they were unveiled by Seberg and Witten.
So that's going to come up, Matt.
You will hear it referenced, but yes.
So now I...
The crux was a couple of individuals, one of which was Eric Weinstein, and that it was based on one or two personalities.
I think it's much more complicated than that.
There's actually a huge, huge community of physicists and huge factions and themes that have...
So, yeah.
And so he also sprinkles in some little random things like about Elon Musk and his view that there's only a couple of planets or something that they can reach.
And this is somehow related to all of this somehow.
And dark energy, dark matter, dark chemistry.
I don't know what dark chemistry is, but rattles off a whole bunch of things.
The dark web.
Yeah, so...
Yeah.
No, I would say the vibe is clear, right?
Like Eric's vibe is there was basically like a takeover, a hostile takeover of the field because of one event.
And yes, it connects in, as it always does, to his narratives that his theory would allow us to traverse the cosmos, escape Einsteinian limits.
And on top of that, it doesn't just touch on physics, it touches on economics, it's everything.
Perhaps this might link to the application of Gageberry in economics, which Eric also talks about in other venues, but whatever.
And there was one note, Matt, this also comes up.
Eric peppers this in just like he peppered it into the conversation with McWest.
Well, let me ask you a question.
I don't have the sense that there's any real reason for any animosity between you and myself, to be honest, at all.
No.
Why do I have the takeaway of what are you doing in my timeline again?
In other words, I would imagine that in a slightly different world, universe A prime rather than A where we live, you and I would be naturally allied on this topic.
And I don't do many of these...
Like, I really hate interpersonal drama.
And so in general, I avoid these, like, I'm worried that you're screwing up the Overton window when we need to be dragging it more open so we get more information.
He said, you know, Sean and I probably we aren't that divided on the fundamental maps.
Throughout the conversation, you make reference to actually our disagreement is hard to fathom, right?
Like there's something...
And this is the thing that the gurus often do where they imply that like, you know, you guys could be good friends if you just, you know, weren't being so antagonistic with them for unknown reasons.
Unknown reasons.
So this is Sean's response to Eric's account.
And this is where, you know, things start to devolve, if you will.
Okay, so my takeaway from that, and was brilliantly articulated, Sean, is that basically you are going to be responsible for the end of civilisation as we know it.
Apparently, yeah, I didn't know, but now the weight is bearing down on my shoulders.
Look, the story Eric just told is a kind of wacky and wildly misleading history of physics in the last 50 or 60 years.
The idea of quantum gravity is a very natural one because the world runs by the rules of quantum mechanics, as far as we know.
This is the international year of quantum because it's the 100th anniversary of really figuring out how quantum mechanics works.
And the thing about quantum mechanics is it's not a theory by itself.
It's a framework in which you can do theory.
In contrast with classical mechanics from Isaac Newton that came before it.
And gravity, our best current theory of gravity from Einstein, the theory of general relativity, is a thoroughgoingly classical theory.
Certainly the default expectation is that someday we will better understand gravity at the quantum level.
You don't have to think that because you don't have to think anything.
You're welcome to come up with better theories.
But again, that's the default expectation.
If you have a different point of view, there's a certain burden of proof to convince people that it's interesting to contemplate this other point of view.
The idea of actually doing the detailed calculations to quantize gravity goes back to at least the 1950s, but it instantly hit right.
Yeah, again, I think a very clear explainer of where things are at and a dose of reality compared to just the weird The spin and the narrative that Eric presents about the story of modern physics just bears very little connection to reality.
And Sean points that out.
Yes, and he goes on.
This is the second half of this where he just explains, you know, counter to Eric rather than Witten's lecture being there.
The fundamental thing which convinced everyone to turn on a dime.
He says, no, it was more like this.
Apparently, what you would need is some kind of miraculous cancellation.
Between all the different contributions from all the different fields.
And people looked at that and said, we have no idea how to make that happen.
Let's not worry about quantum gravity.
And then string theory comes along.
And again, it wasn't even trying to be a theory of gravity.
But when they do this calculation, the miraculous cancellation happens in string theory.
You get a finite answer to what happens when you scatter different particles off of each other.
That is right now the only theory in which that miraculous Miraculous happening actually works.
And this was finally put together as a sort of sensible, viable theory in the mid-1980s.
And it was a calculation by John Schwartz and Michael Green that showed that the theory did not have what are called anomalies.
And you can look up the magazines at the time.
Physics Today ran an article saying anomaly cancellation launches superstring bandwagon.
The point is, the reason why I had to go into those details is many, many physicists instantly became interested in string theory and quantum gravity who were not before.
But the reason they did is not because Ed Witten is a smart guy and he powers over the field.
It's because there was a calculation that showed the theory is promising.
Physicists are not sheep.
If Ed Witten had said we should all work on this, but everyone else looked at it and thought it wasn't very promising, he would have been ignored.
But since then, there's no competitor to string theory that has had that miraculous feature that string theory has.
Again, I find this kind of reportage of what's going on in physics for a general audience done in a very brief period of time.
Extraordinarily, you know, clear and eloquent.
What he says is exactly true, right?
Like, I know enough about modern physics.
Like, I don't understand it, but I know about it, if you know what I mean.
Like, I know this, right?
That string theory is very interesting, has widely considered to be very interesting from a theoretical point of view, does useful mathematical things.
But as Sean Carroll has said many times, it's not perfect.
It's got big problems, right?
In terms of being, you know, empirically testable and so on.
You know, this is why there is a lot of legitimate interest in it, in the broader physics community.
There are dozens of very important and at least six or eight leading string theorists.
It's not all just like one guy who just points the finger and everyone follows like sheep, just like he says.
This is the situation of the field at the moment, not the sort of cartoonish version that Eric has provided.
Well, let's see how Eric responds, because this account, right, it does at least contradict.
The way that Eric described it.
So let's see how Eric responds after, you know, Sean's narrative.
Yeah, I just got completely misportrayed.
And this is actually, I'm glad that this is happening because this is sort of what happens when you tangle with the group of people who are supportive of this program.
I did not say what I think Sean is choosing to either infer incorrectly or imply.
That somehow the world is not quantum mechanical or quantum field theoretic and that somehow gravity is given a hall pass to go home and enjoy relaxation where everyone else has to work hard.
What I said was that the idea of forcing gravity to submit to the same quantization procedures that have been successfully applied to other forces and to matter has not worked.
It has stagnated the field and that Quantum harmonization is far more important.
You could also decide to geometrise the quantum rather than quantize gravity and thus quantize the geometry.
So because Sean's framework precludes somebody saying something outside the framework, the inference is that someone ignorantly just said that gravity can be kept out of the quantum framework, which I absolutely don't say.
Yeah, like put aside the science-y buzzwordy Buzzwordy gobbledygook, right?
It's not gobbledygook, right?
He's speaking to his pet obsession or concern with geometric unity and approaches to whatever.
And, you know, who knows?
Whatever.
It's an idea, right?
There's heaps of ideas, as I think Sean will say.
But the only thing that we'll comment on, Chris, or that I will, is just that very quick, immediately taking that aggrieved tone.
Yeah, you know, Sean Carroll has misrepresented him.
And this is emblematic of what happens in physics.
Like, all Sean Carroll did was correct the cartoonish version of modern physics that Eric provided, providing a realistic one.
Eric responds with, this is being corrected like this.
Disagreeing with me is the kind of, you know, sickness that has infected modern physics.
This is what happens when you tangle with this group of people, right?
So Sean is immediately now representative of the physics mainstream, the physics mafiosa, right?
The big archaeology.
In any case, though, it's notable that what Sean actually said, I have the transcript in front of me, right?
And he said, someday we will better understand gravity at the quantum level.
You don't have to think that because you don't have to think anything.
You're welcome to come up with better theories.
But again, that's the default expectation.
If you have a different point of view, there's a certain burden of proof to convince people that it's interesting to contemplate this other point of view.
So, counter to what Eric suggested, he did not say anybody that dares disagree is a moron and you're not allowed to do it, right?
He actually explicitly said, it's fine.
You just have to provide the evidence for why anybody should take it seriously.
That's all he said.
But Eric already is aggrieved, and he's going to get more aggrieved.
But, um, so this is Eric going on and let's see how he frames more of this as he describes it, the sociology of the field.
Like I would happily see to Sean all sorts of things like the string theorists are by far the smarter group of, uh, the string theorists.
But what you just saw is an example of what is actually going catastrophically wrong in the field, that a dominant narrative that has been perseverated into an as-if reality has created two teams, a smart team that gets it and a dumb team that just doesn't.
And that kind of...
And my guess is that that will recur multiple times during this thing, is that I will not be heard and that Sean will continue to have a version of Eric that lives in his head, which shares my name, but not my understanding nor my beliefs.
So it's really interesting to hear Eric, like almost on purpose, derail the conversation.
Take the innocuous things that Sean Carroll is saying.
And find a way to make a point of grievance on it.
Like, first of all, he's portraying it as, like, it's weird to describe string theorists as the smarter group.
The physicists who are enthusiastic about string theory are the smart ones.
It's like, no.
I don't think people in physics classify each other like that.
They disagree, but they don't go, okay, you're the dumb group and we're the smart ones.
And Eric projects it as, like, this is an example of how he won't be heard.
And, you know, he's being silenced.
And Sean Carroll is basically imagining that Eric is something other than he is.
So, in other words, misrepresenting him.
Misunderstanding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like, it's just like sabotaging on purpose, which I think is understandable when you understand Eric's motivations here.
Well, he is doing that, but we'll see if it has any success.
Sean, but, you know.
The part that got me there, Matt, is Eric said, I'll see to Sean, that, you know, the string theorists are the smart group, and I'll see that they're, you know, doing the better.
But Sean hasn't claimed that.
No, I know.
He didn't say that.
Then he says, and this is the problem, splitting it into smart group and dumb group.
And you're like, you did that.
You just did it.
You were the one that said, I'm going to do this.
You ascribed it to Sean, which isn't something he said.
Then you complained about being misrepresented, but you not only created the insult, then got offended at it, you also misrepresented what Sean said, and then complained that you are going to be constantly misrepresented.
So Eric is almost constantly complaining about things that it is him that is doing it, and Sean is not.
So I want to call this out because it's going to happen repeatedly, okay?
We're moving along, but yeah, so Eric's hackles are up, it's fair to say.
Now, Matt, at this point, you know, Piers steps in.
He's going to get things on track, and he's talking about, like, Eric's paper and whatnot, but he doesn't have the ability to assess it himself, so he did want any good, any responsible, like, critically-minded person.
He went to YouTube and searched Geometric Unity, and let's see what he found.
Because you're so smart about this stuff, your geometric unity paper is 69 pages long, extremely complex, way over my head.
So we did what everyone in my position does these days.
We went onto YouTube and saw if we could find anybody who'd analyzed it and had a conclusion.
And we found this.
Thank you to Eric Weinstein.
It's an avant-garde and creative theory.
Kurt here.
Several months later, this has been so long in the making.
Jeez, you have no idea.
Anyhow, I wanted to say that I mean what I just said.
I may have said this before in the iceberg, and if I haven't, I should have because it bears repeating.
I haven't seen a theory like this come from any single individual ever.
Not one that's this fleshed out or has this amount of unexampled connections within itself, as well as to what's known as the theoretical physics backbone that we talked about earlier.
Now, Eric, there's lots of people doing stuff like that about it.
Why do you think that the mainstream physics world is not taking this seriously enough?
Why indeed?
Why indeed?
So, yes, amazing journalism skills here.
Kirchhoff Mungle's Theory of Everything podcast.
We don't need to remind listeners, of course, but Kirchhoff Mungle has also enthusiastically endorsed God, I forgot his name.
Chris Langan.
Chris Langan.
I mean, his channel is a shrine to alternative theories of everything.
It's in the name.
But it was also, when you go back and look, the sand speakers are there.
John Vervecki, Jonathan Pajot.
It's the usual parade of sand speaking figures.
Yeah, eccentric cranks, which is fine, right?
But that's a YouTube channel.
So answer me this, Chris.
Given that there is a YouTuber out there who is enthusiastic about Eric's unpublished theory, why isn't the physics community taking it more seriously?
Answer me that.
Yes, well, so now let's hear.
Eric is the first one to respond here.
Just to mention, yes, we have an episode that breaks down the...
It's rather credulous.
There was critical papers that examined Erich's theory from a technical point of view.
Tim Nguyen and Fiopolio, right?
Who's Fiopolio?
But, you know, that wouldn't be of interest to you.
But Piers also says there's a lot of people that are interested in this idea.
You know, this Kurt Jemungle, they could have took like any.
I think that's actually entirely true.
But in any case, so how does Eric respond to this?
The framing of this was also that the physics community is not diving into Eric's paper with any enthusiasm.
And here's what Eric says.
Well, first of all, I disagree.
You see, part of what's going on is that Sean is part of a group of physics influencers.
Who are constantly spreading misinformation, which leads to a climate of fear.
You know, I, for example, found the following quote of Sean, what I really, really want to get across to the audience is that nobody in physics departments is discussing this with other people in physics departments.
Now, I don't happen to be coming to you from a physics department at the moment, but I happen to be on a five-day visit to a leading physics department.
And in this situation, I just had a nine-hour conversation and talk with three hours, or four hours rather, of that being an explication of geometric unity.
What Sean is doing constantly is attempting to say, look, let's do some pattern matching.
We have a man generously in midlife.
He's not trained in the subject.
He doesn't appear to accept the quantum gravity program.
He appears to be possessed of the idea that a single individual, Ed Witten, caused all sorts of people who aren't sheep to cohere into a single framework that has been perseverated and doesn't seem to produce fruit.
He has a telling of the tale that is, first of all, just not courageous.
It's at odds with reality.
From my experiences in this physics department, What I can tell you is that we have a situation in which everybody sees the problems.
Yeah, there you go.
So I don't remember, Chris, did he ever make it clear, like, which physics department, some sort of visit?
Well, it was clear that it's a leading physics department, just like Gary's elite universities, right?
He does mention later some universities that he's been invited to, MIT and whatnot.
You'll hear him.
Matt, this two-step around the anti-institution credentialism is infuriating because has Sean at any point in this conversation so far invoked his elite credentials?
I haven't heard it and I'm not going to hear it.
But Eric does it at every turn and all of these gurus do it while constantly maligning that that's what others are doing.
And he's also said there, Matt, just to highlight that he's telling the tale.
That I'm some kind of cook, you know, a riddled guy with a theory of everything who blames everything on Ed Witten.
And that's not a misrepresentation.
One, he didn't present it in that strong of a frame, is what Eric's saying, that's disparagingly.
But two, it was Eric that did that.
Eric said that the field turned on the dime when Ed Witten said the thing.
And he's constantly saying, you know, there's a, he said, Sean's a physics.
Influencer, spreading misinformation, right?
He's constantly disparaging, implying that there is a cabal that's pushing string favorites.
So Eric's saying, I'm being misrepresented as this crank with a theory of everything who blames individuals.
But that's what he's actually arguing.
He's saying it's misrepresenting me, but that's what he said.
Well, yeah.
And also, he's putting words into Sean Carroll's mouth, right?
Sean Carroll.
You know, we heard him say it, and this is the tone that he strikes, which is that, you know, if you want to convince, it's true the physics community isn't paying very much attention to you and your ideas, we probably won't, unless you provide us with something to get our teeth into, some actual kind of evidence, and you actually convince people, because that's just how it works.
His response to that is, they see me as an outsider.
I'm not from the inside.
and they see me as someone who's going against their agenda.
And he takes the opportunity to say that Sean Carroll is promoting misinformation and is contributing to Yeah, an influencer.
And I'm going to mention Sean Carroll's H-Index at some point, by the way.
You can do it.
I can't do it.
contributing to a climate of fear, Chris, and that his representation I know.
What is that?
So he manages to be insulting and inaccurate at the same time while actually taking umbrage and taking insult, even though none was given.
Well, you remember we noted before in the conversation with Mick West that he invokes like all these kinds of social justice concepts, which in other instances, he's disparaging off because he's kind of suggesting that people that criticize him are misogynists or the, you know, just there's all sorts of things.
I am much more careful when I hear somebody talking about chemtrails, for example, if they come from the black American community, then if they don't, and I'm much more undeniable understanding if somebody comes from a radical progressive family that went through the McCarthy era and they don't trust the government.
So in other words, when particular groups of people are repeatedly lied to and manipulated and have a different history than the rest of the country, I tend to take their fears much more seriously.
If you didn't go through the Tuskegee medical experiment, if your community wasn't subjected to that, you may have a very different sense that, you know, something's going on.
Or if you're aware that we've experimented with biological agents involuntarily against people in subway stations.
There's all sorts of weird stuff that we've gotten up to.
Like in any other setting where Eric is talking about people creating a culture of fear and spreading misinformation, he would be reeling against, that's what they say about us.
And maybe, you know, charitably, this is him being, what's the word, like arch, right?
In turning the language game around on his attacker.
But to be clear, Sean hasn't done that.
He didn't say, Eric is spreading, you know, misinformation and it's dangerous.
He just said it's inaccurate.
His story of the field doesn't represent the history.
Well, but he didn't say, you know, Eric is just an influencer and his story is like dangerous and all this kind of thing.
So, yeah, I just want to highlight that Eric again, he will complain that people are demonizing him, but he is the one doing that.
Yeah, it's an amazing little trick.
And I think it's quite effective.
If you act as though someone has said something or done something, if you act like that, then people kind of don't really remember too much exactly what was said, but they go, well, I guess he must have.
Yeah, that was insulting of Sean.
He must have been insulting.
Otherwise, why would Eric be acting insulted?
Because people can't actually imagine.
Someone like Eric, right?
So it actually makes this technique quite effective.
Yeah, somebody with the combination of an extremely thin skin and who is extremely insulting and aggressive simultaneously.
Like it's an odd combination to have.
But anyway...
He then goes into this thing that there is no crisis in theoretical physics.
And as one of my physics colleagues said last night, the first rule of Physics Fight Club is don't talk about the problems with Physics Fight Club.
There is a self-evident crisis.
I can show it to you numerically.
Somehow the idea is that a small number of people who are either at the top of the physics influencer pile, which is where I would put Sean, Yep, whose key feature is the exclusion of different perspectives.
and there we hear it again.
There's a crisis in modern physics, and you're not allowed to talk about it.
This is the first rule of Physics Fight Club.
There's a conspiracy of silence going on and it's being driven by...
Those people at the top of the prestige pile, top of the influencer pile.
Again, it's Sean Carroll, right?
Sean Carroll is one of these bad actors.
Like, he's already been insulting, frankly.
Like, attacked Sean Carroll's character about seven times now.
And also gotten upset with imaginary attacks on himself.
Slacks on his own.
Yeah.
And just to be clear as well, he separated out there.
He'd put Sean Carroll at the top of the physics influencers, and there's a separate pile.
There's the prestige pile, right?
The researcher prestige pile.
So I think it's just a subtle dig.
I know.
It's just so irritating on so many levels.
Because one, I know in Eric Weinstein's mind, the influencer pile and the prestige pile, that is whatever people who are leading in terms of things, they're kind of equivalent, right?
And then they're not.
And someone like Sean Carroll knows they're not, right?
He's very clear, right?
He has a job as a working physicist.
He has a career as a working physicist.
He has a side gig as, you know, doing his podcast show, right?
Where he does some explainers.
He does some educational outreach stuff.
He does some interviews.
And it's popular.
It's engagement.
Public engagement.
And that's all it is, right?
It is not actually driving the direction of modern physics.
Sean Carroll would never think that in a million years, right?
And Eric has, and I will continue, I think, to like attack Sean Carroll, like put Sean Carroll down.
And look, I might as well point that here because Eric is having a good go at Sean Carroll.
Sean Carroll represents himself as a working physicist, not as one of the leading luminaries.
He's not, you know, modern sciences.
I don't know, John Wheeler or Stephen Hawking or anything like that.
He's a working physicist like someone like me is a working psychologist.
And he's got a very respectable track record.
He's been cited 35,600 times on Google Scholar, published hundreds of papers.
And, you know, like he's got a credible track record as a working physicist, which it has to be mentioned, Eric Weinstein does not.
He has published in any field whatsoever.
He doesn't appear to have published virtually anything on any topic.
But Sean Carroll hasn't actually had a go at him for that, right?
He has not attacked Eric's output.
Not yet, yes.
Yes, but he will, and I think with some justification, given that Eric has been putting him down.
He's going to specifically reference his paper.
He's not actually going to, you know, attack in general, Eric Zoller papers and whatnot.
But just before we get to Sean's response, okay, so, you know, we make this point that often one of the things that gurus like to do is use technical terminology to demonstrate their intelligence rather than to communicate.
They aren't doing it.
In order to use technical language to talk about a topic in a specific way, right?
It is rather like a display of intellectual progress.
It's the same with gurus who drop in references to research, you know, like Magpie is showing off their shiny collections.
Now, here's what I would describe as Eric's effort to dazzle with Technobabble.
Now, if you ask me what's going on with geometric unity, You won't understand it, but it'll be over very quickly, and it should be an astounding comment.
If you take a Lorentzian metric as a section of a bundle of pointwise Lorentz metrics and pull back the positive vial spinners, with suitable passing to maximal compact subgroup, you get one generation of Petit Salam Grand Unified Fermions.
Now, that was very quick, but what it really just said is that general relativity knows the standard model.
Anybody of Schron's ability should be able to parse that 20-second sojourn and say, is that something we know?
Is that something that might be interesting?
Then what we'll have is we'll have the typical physicist large-language model conversation in which physicists will ask, do you have a new prediction at anything at electroweak scale, which is a question that doesn't get asked to the string theorists.
Indeed.
Indeed.
This is Eric puffing up his peacock's tail, right?
It's almost like a display to Sean Carroll as well.
They say, look, just to be clear, Sean, you're messing with someone who's, you know, on the level.
I can speak in these dense physics soundbites.
And, you know, he warns peers, the audience won't get it.
but this is to demonstrate my bona fides that I'm the real deal.
And then he preempts saying, Yeah.
And look, obviously the premise of the whole thing is absurd.
Like rattling off a 15 to 20 second version of your speculative, highly abstract theoretical physics idea.
Like why?
Apart from to show your plumage, I think it's quite effective from a rhetorical point of view too.
If Sean Carroll responds to that, then it's kind of ridiculous and it's kind of playing into his premise, which is he's the guy, he's the exciting outsider, him on one side.
All of modern physics, all the physicists, the entire world on the other, take him seriously on an equal footing.
His theory has been covered on a YouTube episode, Chris.
How about that?
Now, if Sean Carroll tries to engage with that, now that would be crazy and would be useless.
On the other hand, if Sean Carroll says, well, that's just a bunch of words, right?
There's no way I can really engage with that here and now.
It's got to do with the details.
Eric can, of course, then claim that, see, this is how the physics community is just pretending.
They just don't want to know.
This is too dangerous for them to handle.
Yeah, exactly.
Sean Carroll's kind of damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, confronted with something like that.
So his response, I think, is very good.
So I'll play it.
There's two parts to it, but this is the first part.
Well, I find it very telling.
I don't know.
It makes me sad that you are looking for a second opinion about Geometric Unity and you go to YouTube and see what pops up.
I don't think that's the standard to which we would like to aspire.
Look, there's a lot of talk so far about sociology, and I'd much rather talk about physics, but I would like to let people out there know who might be working outside the academic physics community that it is 100% possible to have a good idea and have it have an impact on what physicists do.
You have to do a certain amount of work to show that your theory is worth the time, that it is respectable, that it is interesting, that it is promising.
The first thing you've got to do is make sure that your theory makes contact with modern physics as it is understood.
If you have a new paper out, businesses are going to look at it.
They're going to look for, you know, where's Lagrangian?
Where's the interactions?
Is the proton stable?
Is there dark matter?
Like, how does it fit into what I already know?
Those are all different levels of the stack, Sean.
Eric's paper has none of that.
You would also ask, has the theory been shown to be viable in a very basic way?
Is it stable?
Is it free of anomalies?
Is it finite in the sense of the quantum mechanical calculation that I already mentioned?
Again, none of that is there.
Are there any new predictions?
Yes, a very good response.
And, you know, it's just crazy this even has to be said.
There are thousands of cranks all over the world.
And there are people that aren't even cranked, that are just a bit eccentric or have got their own ideas, who are having ideas about physics all the time and are getting to the same point at which Eric has gotten to.
But as Sean says, if you want everyone to drop what they're doing and give all their attention to your idea, then you have to do the work.
And it's really hard.
It's not that there's some rule.
That no one's allowed to change the agenda.
No one's allowed to contribute.
It's just that actually making a genuine contribution at this point is really, really hard.
And you know it's really hard because all the people who are super smart studied physics at university and you take the smartest of those and they did their PhDs and the smartest of those are then working and leading labs and stuff.
And if they're still struggling to crack a grand unified theory of physics, you know that it's a pretty difficult task.
So you just don't expect that if you have an idea that everyone has to pay attention to it.
Well, the thing that I liked about this is, you know, again, the information density.
You got Sean Respond, the point about using the YouTube video for a second opinion and like kind of chastise peers that you could have just spoke to scientists.
But then second, to clarify, look, it is possible for outsiders to contribute.
And as you said, he then...
So he said, you know, very clearly, you can contribute without being inside the mainstream physics community, but it's just, it's not easy because, you know, you have to show how your theory contributes to all these rather tricky questions.
And he goes on.
Oh, and by the way, just one other point was you heard Eric start to interject.
Yes.
What?
Excuse me?
Yes, that's important too.
But here's the other half of that response.
Eric says, and completely correctly, string theory doesn't make any new predictions either.
But also, I really don't want people to get the idea that string theory has some dominant picture.
In my department at Johns Hopkins, we have...
I think it's a good system.
In my department at Johns Hopkins, we have six professors in the theoretical physics group.
One of them does string theory, and even he only does it sort of half time.
I wish we had more, honestly.
This is very typical.
Even at the most stringy departments, it's maybe half the people who do string theory.
There are plenty of other approaches being And finally, does your theory solve any interesting problems that we already thought we had?
That's the reason why string theory became interesting, because we had this problem with quantum gravity that it gave infinite answers, and string theory solved that problem.
And again, I see none of that in Eric's paper.
So it's very possible.
That somewhere in Eric's theory there are interesting ideas, but he has given us no reason to think that it is a promising theory.
I encourage other people who would like to have an impact on the research agenda of modern physics to take these easy steps rather than going on podcasts and talking about their victimization.
Oh, I mean, I have to say, Is this the point where his body language is very revealing, Chris, where he's taking his glasses?
Well, that last thing, yes, this is going to come up in the next one.
Eric's kind of response here.
He's very upset about this.
You heard Eric interrupt, but Sean, because he's a podcaster, said, well, now, hold on.
I let you speak.
Let me finish my point.
That's a good system.
And Eric was kind of chastised, which he didn't like, because usually this is how people like Eric operate.
You know, they interject and they interrupt people and they'll go on.
But there, Matt, I really am impressed with Sean Carroll compared to all the people we cover.
Because again, he went into the fact that yes, Eric's right.
String theory is having some issues, you know, around predictions.
That's true.
Then he clarified that, however, the portrayal of a unified society Because even in his department, there's lots of different perspectives.
Even in departments where there's lots of string theorists, they're not all in lockstep.
So it's not as homogenous as Eric describes.
And then he says, okay, now it is possible that you have interesting ideas in the paper.
So he's not dismissing it or that other people could have interesting ideas, but you haven't done the necessary legwork in order to make people convinced of that.
So that's the issue.
And the last thing is a dig, right?
It's a dig at Eric.
But up to this point, he's been quite restrained.
And it's a relatively limited dig where he's saying, you know, that it would be better to put more work in than crying about victimization on podcasts.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, it is a dig, but it's an accurate dig because Eric most certainly does do that.
And it is good to confront it straight up.
Like you said, Chris, I'm just incredibly, I was always impressed with Sean Carroll.
I'm just even more impressed after this episode because he is an excellent communicator and he is not falling into all of the traps that Eric is laying for him.
Eric would like him to basically support his outsider status, support his idea that he's dangerous and stuff like that, support the idea that he's simply not allowed to make a contribution.
But, you know, Sean doesn't go in for any of that.
And in fact, I've heard him speak about physics.
In other contexts, completely nothing to do with Eric.
And this is true, right?
This is the sort of thing that he says.
Like, he has said very similar things in other contexts.
So, yes.
But Eric won't like this.
And I think it's a good thing to remember his previous interview with Mick West when, again, with Mick West, he was very quick to create a fence, very quick to sort of derail the conversation, make it about personalities and about...
Whereas Mick West wanted to talk about the topic, which was UFOs and evidence for them or against.
Conversely, when we turn over to the UFO community, you know, the issue is I don't want people who've seen something or who have data scared anymore.
And it's very important.
Who are you scared of?
I mean, you keep talking about this debunking community, but who exactly are you referring to?
I mean, I'm not a person who mocks people.
So that just comes across to me as playing, I'll be blunt, that comes across to me as playing dumb.
No, I think that lots of people are saying, It's a genuine question because there's not very many UFO debunkers out there.
I think it's a really disingenuous sounding question.
And I may have you wrong, Mick, but...
Are you including me as part of this?
Yeah.
Sean Carroll is wanting to keep things straight as well, but he is responding there to Eric's claims of victimization.
Yeah, so he said to individualize, I talked about the physics, but yeah, so...
There's quite a few things here that we can talk about.
Okay, Eric, it's always a pivotal moment in these debates when you put your glasses on, so I'm bracing myself.
First of all, Sean has been nothing but civil throughout our relationship.
He's also extremely nasty, but I really appreciate the civility, and I attempt to respond in kind.
Sean and I really shouldn't be divided, but we appear to be.
I don't understand it.
He did respond.
It just shows that none of this is serious.
Speaking about what I'm talking about, he said this is not something that is going to be a thing.
He also says that he hasn't read it.
So let me say a bunch of things to Dr. Carroll.
Dr. Carroll, I'd like to hear your explanation for three generations of flavor chiral fermions with the observed quantum numbers under the group SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1.
In another podcast, you said, before I listen to your theory, you should listen to my Sean Carroll's theory.
My theory is known as the standard model.
I can give you an explanation for why SU3 cross SU2 cross SU1, why there are three generations, why 16 particles in a generation, why the observed quantum numbers are the way they are, why the Higgs sector comes out of seemingly nowhere with a quartic potential, A quadratic term.
Why the Yukawa coupling is just there just so in order to produce mass when the weak force forbids a mass directly in the Duraka operator.
Sean knows what every single thing that I just said is in that statement.
Why Sean chooses to misportray the fact that I can say why there should be dark matter, what the dark energy is, what the exact quantum number assignments are for the two families that are luminous that have yet to be seen, I have no idea, because Sean also proudly says that he hasn't looked at it and hasn't read it.
That's why he says that there are no Lagrangians in it.
I have no idea where Sean gets this stuff.
Right.
So I'll keep the comments to a minimum here, Chris, but isn't it interesting that his response to Sean Carroll's little speech there, which was very cogent and easy for people like you and me and the general audience to understand.
Yeah.
Eric straight away zaps to, you know, chirality and luminous this, that and the other stuff that he knows.
No one will understand except for Sean.
And again, I can't help but suspect this is a debating tactic because he could be speaking nonsense to Sean and still win the debate in the court of public opinion, right?
Yeah, because it looks like Sean can't respond to him.
And I don't think he's speaking nonsense, but I think he's referencing things that he's addressed in his theory of everything.
Without any of the necessary evidence, which is what Sean was saying.
So for Sean to get into a technical debate over the state of evidence that Eric has provided for the various things that he's asserting, it would be a waste of time because there's nothing there.
Well, that's right.
And Eric could claim victory, right?
Because the conversation is on a level where no one except for Sean Carroll.
Would know that it wasn't stacking up.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that he's speaking nonsense, right?
I'm not saying that he's making up all these terms.
The terms mean stuff that he's saying.
Yeah, exactly.
I know he's referencing a whole bunch of real things, but it doesn't necessarily add up into a compelling argument in the context of this conversation.
No, you could do the exact same thing with any technical language, right?
If you understood statistics well.
You can speak like this to somebody else that understands statistics, but it doesn't mean what you're saying is actually a kind of coherent thing.
You could make debates between Bayesian and frequentists sound like it's this thing.
And your statements that you could evoke wouldn't need to be inaccurate to be fairly pointless to a general audience.
It continues.
Also, just a note, Eric's reading, right?
The thing with the glasses is he's reading a tweet where Sean Carroll is responding that he hasn't read Eric's paper.
Now, he hasn't said that in this conversation, right?
And he's referenced what is in and not in Eric's paper.
So Eric is basing it on social media, which is the way he operates.
But in any case, he continues.
Sean is insistent.
That the idea that somehow I am not choosing to go through the usual channels and instead talking as he is right now via YouTube is somehow significant when I've just given talks in three different countries on dark energy.
And by the way, every time I talk about talking about this, somebody is telling me don't talk about the fact that you're actually in a physics department.
And what I'm trying to tell you is I give talks in physics departments.
I hang out with physics colleagues.
I'm welcomed at places like the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet I have to deal with this nonsense.
I talk to both physics colleagues.
You know, right now you've got a giant problem called something called DESI or DESI, the dark energy, or is it spectroscopic instrument, which is at the moment going after Einstein's unwanted cosmological constant.
That is not a constant.
The dark energy is not a constant term.
That is the only term that you can put into the Einstein field equations because the Einsteinian curvature satisfies an automatic differential equation called divergence-free.
So if you have another term in the equation, it has to have the same property.
There's only one known automatic equation, which is that the metric of Einstein that creates space-time is annihilated by its own Levy-Civita connection.
And Sean, you're misrepresenting things because I'm going to give a formula for the dark energy.
I do all sorts of things that you have no idea of because your attitude, which you repeat in other podcasts, and I highly advise you to spend more time in your physics department and less time on YouTube, is that this is not a serious thing.
Nobody's taking it seriously.
And your misportrayal of the situation is nearly constant for reasons that completely elude me.
It is that little two-step, isn't it?
Because on one hand, he's on the outside.
Nobody in the physics community will take him seriously.
He's being ostracized because they're all in lockstep.
But actually, he's well-respected in the physics community.
He gives talks.
He's visiting all the best institutions.
Actually, it's Sean Carroll who's the social media gadfly.
Yeah.
And as per usual, there's lots of people behind the scenes agreeing with Eric, telling them that there's, you know, they can't talk about this publicly, but they all agree with him, they like him.
That's right.
They're all so keen on it, but they can't, they don't dare to write a paper about it or to do an experiment or something.
And Eric again takes, you know, giving a lecture as that's what amounts to it.
And just to be clear, for people outside academia.
You can get invited to institutions or departments for a number of reasons.
Somebody might have just liked you and thought that you're going to give an interesting, exciting talk.
They might be mental themselves.
It can be that.
Or they might not be.
But there's nothing at university where they're like, we need to sign off that everybody coming into this building has been vetted and that they're going to give a talk that's perfectly reasonable.
Like that is not it.
So Eric is treating it like, And that's like a thing that's more in the kind of credentialist influencer space that he's deriding there.
Because, you know, giving a talk does not mean that you have contributed anything significant on a topic.
No, that's right.
it often means you've just got a friend there.
He does...
I mean, like, given...
Given that he's kind of a little bit vague about these visits and the talks, you know, I would not be imagining a large auditorium, you know, filled with 100 physicists.
You know, we don't know, but I suspect.
So it does happen.
And, you know, there was a professor at Oxford that invited him to give a lecture, right?
And so just, again, these things happen.
You know, you go to the ARC conference in the UK, there's various conservative academics and whatnot that would probably be happy.
To host Eric in their department.
So, you know, whatever the case, whatever is occurring there, Eric is definitely laying it on thick that this, you know, is important and that actually Sean is the one who's, you know, just wasting his time on YouTube.
And I like that Sean, you know, kind of laughed and said, wow, in response to that.
But Sean's response to Eric, so you mentioned the SmackDown, Matt.
This is a pretty good SmackDown.
So here's how Sean responds.
The good news is I have read Eric's paper.
Here it is.
I actually have it here, right here.
And it's worse than you would think.
Just very quickly, it starts off by saying the author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an entertainer and host of a podcast.
This work of entertainment is a draft work in progress, and it may not be built upon.
So we're not allowed to think about Eric's theory and write a follow-up paper about it in complete contradiction to everything that is normally done in scientific discourse.
You hope that people build upon your theories.
You don't try to prevent them.
And later on, it says, this document is an attempt to begin recovering.
I'm going to read this.
This document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory, which at this point is only partially remembered and stitched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings, and the like, dating back as far as 1983.
And this is why this paper is not going to appear in the peer-reviewed literature.
It's not serious.
It's a dog-ate-my-homework kind of thing.
If you have a dark matter thing, if you have a dark matter prediction, if you have a dark energy prediction, I want to see a plot.
In the paper, I want to see redshift versus distance.
I want to see a calculation of a relic abundance so I can figure out how much dark matter is supposed to be.
If you do that, people will pay attention to the theory.
It's very possible.
I just have to respect Short so much for not letting Eric interject.
Eric interrupt.
Yeah.
Just carrying through.
carrying through.
I mean, because like you said, like Eric is a good He's a good public debater.
He is good at all these maneuvers.
Yeah.
You know, good in the worst possible way, if you know what I mean.
And Sean Carroll is playing with a straight deck here, but he won't let himself be diverted by Eric.
Well, Eric, but again, Eric is so, like, in some ways, he set his own trap there because he could have just asked, Sean, have you read my paper?
You said previously you haven't.
Have you now read it?
And he would have said, yeah, I have it here.
Right?
And then you wouldn't have got caught in this thing about he's never even read by people and then he gets to rhetorically flourish and say, good news!
I'm going to read directly from it.
And, you know, Eric again gets annoyed about him reading what Eric put in as a disclaimer about it being a work of fiction, that you're not allowed to, you know, build on it.
And this disclaimer, which he adds later, saying, you know, that it's, It's only a partially remembered theory and whatnot.
That's all what Eric said.
He's just reading from it, right?
And then Eric is like, well, come on.
And the last thing he said, which only took about 20 seconds, was all that shit you said about dark matter and whatever, it means nothing unless you're providing these kind of details.
If you don't provide that, nobody can assess it, right?
So that's it.
But his critique was condensed.
Clear.
And he's saying this paper, you know, you yourself, Eric, are saying it's just, you know, the partial rememberings of notes and jotted down ideas and whatnot.
So what are you complaining about?
And Eric's sponsor, of course, is how dare you?
Oh, well, yeah.
Well, he did say that, didn't he?
Oh, he did during that?
Maybe that was his first.
He's going to say it more clearly.
He's going to say it again, is he?
Yeah, so again, this really is similar to the Mick West.
Type thing where he, again, fabricated a grievance with Mick West when all Mick West did was basically disagree with him and say, look, you haven't put up very good evidence here.
I don't think you've done the work, whatever.
He used phrases like, I don't like how I'm feeling in my body right now.
If you recall, part of it was because Nick West mentioned that he liked to, his interest in the topic, he liked to flex his mental muscles, you know, to dig into it.
And, you know, eventually I kind of settled down in a way on this UFO thing because it's so...
Very simple physics, just simple Newtonian stuff, linear algebra and things like that.
It's nothing complicated, but it's stuff that I used in my previous career.
And so I kind of enjoy flexing those muscles.
And recently I've been enjoying flexing my muscles programming simulations.
And I do also enjoy the interactions with people.
I like talking to people.
I like talking to people who believe, and people who used to believe, and to a certain degree, talking to skeptics.
And Eric took it as meaning flex, like the kind of modern Gen Z lingo of flex on someone, like kind of humiliate them.
Trying to figure out who's active in trying to bond Who's confused?
Who needs to be made unconfused?
And who is saying that they're seeing something that needs to be followed up and not necessarily having their reputation destroyed because somebody wants to, in your own words, flex.
I don't find the flexing fun.
I didn't say flex.
You did say flex.
Well, it's not a word I actually use.
Did you not say something about flexing your own?
Oh, flexing my muscles.
But it's not like flex, as in like, you know, showboating, flexing.
You did say flex.
Yes, I know.
But for me, flexing actually means the same thing as stretching or exercising.
Okay, but right now I just went through exactly one of these moments where I tried to remember something you'd said, and then you told me that you don't use that as a phrase, and I happened to be able to recall it.
Yes, but in that sense, the sense that you meant.
I understand.
No?
Yeah.
I think you did say it in the original sense, So I don't think that's even correct.
So my point to you is I don't enjoy the feeling in my body right now, which is I've just contradicted you.
You assured me that that's not a term that you use.
We had perhaps at most a misunderstanding, but the feeling of somebody saying, And thinking that that's fun.
Your initial description of your activities is a hobby.
I don't much care for this as a hobby.
If it's a duty, because the world is going to be filled up with nonsense, I actually appreciate that.
I want to be very clear about that.
But the fun of interacting with people, many of whom are scared.
I've seen people close to and filled with tears.
I've seen people who feel that their lives have been destroyed because they have made contact with something that they can't talk about.
Which obviously wasn't what he was saying, but Eric got extremely outraged.
And even when he clarified, Eric still asserted that even if that's not what he meant, it is fundamentally what he was saying.
So it's just, yeah, Eric is a master at getting outraged over things that people are very clear that they haven't said that.
They're not meaning to insult you in that way.
And like Sean Carroll's critique here is strong, but it's very specific.
It's like you've published a paper.
You haven't provided enough detail for the physics community to grab a whip.
So there's nothing here.
And also you yourself in your preamble to it said not to take this seriously.
And of course, it is just a manuscript sitting on the internet.
It hasn't been published anywhere.
So I think his conclusion there is very reasonable.
Why should it be clear, Matt?
It has been published on the internet.
So just technical language.
You mean it has not passed through peer-reviewed and be published, but it is published on Eric's website.
Fair enough.
It has been posted on a website, yes.
Yes.
That's it.
That's right.
So here's Eric responding to Sean's points.
He tried to interject, but now he's going to have a chance to respond, provide interruption.
Sean, first of all, how dare you?
Second of all, if you're going to go How dare you read your paper?
of the How dare you cast shade and aspersions of the kind that I wouldn't seek to cast on you, but I will now.
I'm not seeking your favor, nor do I need to seek your approval.
As you know, you failed to gain tenure at the University of Chicago.
You're not highly regarded in the field.
And again, I'm only returning the shade in which you just yourself cast.
I wouldn't have done this otherwise.
You then spent time as a non-tenured faculty at You're not a leading person in the field.
My belief structure about this is that you imagine that I'm coming to you saying, oh, Sean Carroll, tell me which graph I should do so that I can please you.
As you know, because you've read the paper, what you said about Lagrangians is false.
What you said about predictions is false.
My concern is what you did is that you seized upon something where people have built on my ideas since 1994.
The equations that Natty Seiberg and Ed Witten introduced that took over the world were called the insufficiently nonlinear equations when I was at Harvard in 1987 and introduced them.
There we go.
There's Eric claiming he's responsible for the Cyborg within the creations, right?
He introduced them in 1987.
And, you know, they're not...
And you also, I mean, I'll let you respond to the first part of it.
But I just want to note that he had prepared all of Sean's history in advance.
Because it's not like he just has a flashbulb memory of everybody's credentials.
So he obviously was prepared to trot out his employment history.
And so much for, you know, he doesn't care about credentials and whatnot.
Sean Carroll was not tenured, is an attack line, right?
Yeah.
it's absurd and just deeply well pretty vile really I mean, this is how narcissists react when you prick their bubble or you embarrass them in public, right?
The venom comes out really fast, but it's funny to track.
Like the logic of his response there.
Like the first part was, how dare you?
How dare you?
Basically, how dare you criticize my paper, right?
Yeah.
The next point was, I don't care what you think.
I don't need your approval.
And then the next part was, you suck.
Sean Carroll, you suck, right?
So it then rattles off, as you said, a pre-prepared list of career failings.
And I just want to, you have to remind everyone, Sean Carroll's career.
In physics is a thousand, ten thousand.
It's like comparing his track record in physics.
He isn't one of the leading luminaries.
He's not Einstein, right?
But regardless.
His track record and career in physics is a moderately substantial one.
Eric's, we have to remind you, is zero.
It's absolutely zero.
So it makes no sense for him to be attacking Sean Carroll's, you know, career accomplishments.
And then he says, just like a lot of bullies and, you know, manipulative narcissists, I'm only saying this.
I'm only doing this to you because you criticize me.
Yeah, this is me returning to fever.
So this is the kind of thing where...
And no, like Sean criticized his paper.
He criticized the way Eric is presenting the field and failing to show evidence for his claims.
But he's been consistently...
He's highlighted various issues and whatnot.
So he hasn't been aggressively attacking Eric.
He's just been disagreeing.
But for a narcissist, disagreement is attack.
So Eric took the gloves off.
And it's a very stupid attack because the response to this could be.
That Sean responded outraged and saying, how dare you?
Because that's how Eric would respond.
If you suggested one quarter of this about his track record, he would not stand for this.
That's right.
And that's where people like that often get it wrong because his intention may well be to provoke Sean into responding how he would.
But Sean is cut from a different cloth.
Well, we'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
So this hasn't finished here, Matt.
There's a couple more insults to lay on.
So here's Eric finishing off, and then we'll get to Sean's response.
The question is why Pierre is an entertainer rather than as a physicist.
First of all, neither you nor I are trained as physicists, Sean.
You're actually trained as an astronomer.
What you have in this situation is that you and I are both interloping in a field that is not the one to which we trained.
That doesn't bother me about what you're doing.
I've enjoyed some of your papers.
I've thought very poorly of others.
You have a wide range of interests.
I think you're very creative.
Your intellectually insulting aspect reminds me of you as the Marie Antoinette of theoretical physics influencers.
I'm not here to please you.
You know that there are tables in the document that you're reading that have plenty of predictions.
You know that it solves plenty of problems.
What you are doing is creating an environment of fear where every university worries what does it mean to talk to this person.
And what I would say to you is you are commenting on the effect that you are in fact inducing.
You and a small cadre of people Yes, yes.
So more of the same, more insults, but also returning to that theme of by criticizing his material, saying that it's not useful or interesting.
He's like the Mary Antoinette of physics influences.
Again, contributing to a culture of fear.
Again, this is, I think, Eric's agenda here, which is to promote this point of view, which is that he is the forbidden fruit.
He has this dangerous wisdom.
And people like Sean Carroll in Eric's Alternative Universe are these powerful policemen out there enforcing A regime where we cannot let the exciting new ideas in.
That's the alternate universe that Eric would like to invite us in on.
Yeah, and just to be clear, the thing to remember through all of the Eric content that we cover and all of Eric's appearances, his primary purpose in anything that he says or does is to promote Eric.
To show that he is a complex, serious thinker that needs to be respected.
That is the underpinning of everything that Eric's doing.
That's why he's doing the physics technobabble speeches.
That's why he's aggrieved anytime there's the implication that he's not taken seriously.
And that's what annoys him the most.
Sean there insulted multiple times, right?
Like basically called, you know, a no-name underachiever who isn't fit to even critically evaluate Eric's paper.
So let's see how he responds.
Look, I mean, I didn't say anything about Eric as a person, his history or anything like that.
I said things about the paper.
Everything he says about me is like 90% true, as many things he says.
The paper is not giving us any reason to think that this approach is promising.
There is no quantum mechanics in the paper.
There is no attempt at showing that this solves any of the known problems of quantum gravity.
Again, it's not just about Eric, it's about anyone.
If you want to make an impact on the physics research community, you have to give them a reason to think that what you do is promising.
Sean, you have a serious problem with dark energy that you're developing, and it's going to go right through having being a problem with lambda CDM to eventually being a problem with the Einstein field equations themselves.
Perched as they are atop the space of metrics as a completely inadequate space of field content.
What you've just said and what the aspersion you have just cast, you are simply not qualified to say.
Sean Carroll has a problem with these things, him personally.
Yeah, I mean, look, Sean Carroll is doing the right thing here, I think, in terms of debating.
Not taking a bit.
He's not taking the bait.
Just imagine if the shoe was on the other foot.
Imagine if it was Eric who had been cited 35,000 times and he was debating with someone who had never really written a paper.
And if that person had been attacking his track record, his credibility as a serial.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine that?
But Sean Carroll is a different kind of guy.
He's not a fragile narcissist, so he laughs it off and he does what one would ideally do in this situation, which is to not let go of his point.
Eric basically doesn't really defend his paper.
He shifts the ground to these personal things and basically throwing a lot of dust around.
But he returns to the point, which is that it's not about you, Eric.
It's not that you're so dangerous and so exciting that we can't let your ideas in.
It's not that you're not allowed to contribute to this stuff.
It's just that you have to do better in terms of your contributions.
You have to finish it.
You have to not take it as a joke before anyone's going to take it seriously.
That's an excellent point.
Now, the beauty there is that, This is like standards that would apply to anyone.
And he kind of not taking the bait when Eric has, you know, tried to like create this kind of, you know, antagonistic exchange.
It makes Eric look bad, right?
It makes it look like, oh, somebody has taken the higher ground than me with little effort.
And they were also suggesting that I'm unnecessarily a person.
So Eric immediately, I think this is a great illustration, retreats to high-obstraction physics talk in order to go above the audience's level, say, "Look, this is actually about these complex physics topics, and you've got real problems that you're trying to ignore that's happening there." And then again, at the end, saying, "You're casting dispersions at me." Trying to remind everyone, "Look, this is about me.
I'm being attacked." And you're not qualified to do that.
But that's Eric's technique.
Speak in very complex, dense soliloquies.
Imply that there's a lot of serious debate between equally intellectual individuals going on and that they are engaged in all these underhand tactics.
But it's Eric.
It should be transparently obvious that Eric is doing that, where Sean is maintaining a fairly straightforward and coherent critique.
Which is not deeply personal.
It's simply roughly critiquing the people.
But that's normal in academia.
And he's essentially saying there's nothing there to critique, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes, when I listen to him debate, when he retreats to that high arcane techno babble, it's like an octopus squirting ink and retreating back to his rock.
But the real grappling game for him is actually in the realm of self-aggrandizement.
Conspiracy, theorizing, and grievance.
The main emotional hook that normal listeners to this will understand from him is that he's been unfairly smeared.
Sean Carroll is part of a powerful group of bullies, policemen that are preventing exciting and dangerous ideas like his getting any play.
So like what you said, it is absolutely important to remember with someone like Eric, like with many of our gurus, is that their goal...
That is his goal and he's doing his best, but Sean Carroll is not really handing it to him.
He's not letting him be the exciting, dangerous.
powerful, brilliant figure that he so wants to be.
Now, this last...
But this one, Matt, is really guru gold because this is one of the best arguments I think I've heard a guru trot out in a while, like as a kind of emergency maneuver.
Break in case of emergency, right?
Eric has smashed it and he wants Sean Carroll to, you know, think.
Maybe he's dismissing him too quickly.
And what does he invoke to support this?
What you have said is that I have given no reason.
Let me imagine that that paper, which was a draft rushed to get to an April 1st date, remains in a world where Sam Altman and Elon Musk continue to compete for better and better AIs.
What would you say if at some point...
This thing solves all sorts of problems, and the problem that we have is that a group of influencers with a penchant for being, and this is becoming one of my least favourite words, although I didn't have any negative association until recently, debunkers.
Wow.
Touche, Sean.
What if?
Counterpoint.
Counterpoint.
You're saying the paper's not very good.
The physics community has not sorted out and celebrated it and rushed away to change the direction of research.
But what if in the future some hyper-intelligent AIs were to read the paper and realise that actually it was the secret to life, the universe and everything?
And maybe it's just that you're not smart enough.
I think the subtext of this is, The DA, I wasn't sure.
The AI also agreed that the problem was that we have a group of physics influencers.
Is that the conclusion of the...
Like, what if the AI also thought that you guys...
Like, this is an insane argument, but it's like such a school...
It's not even Schoolyard, it's below that because it's like, what if in the future And, like, what do you even say to that?
Yeah.
Well, let's hope, Eric, that someday you're vindicated.
Yeah.
There can't be an argument, I guess, because it's a hypothetical, right?
So that speaks to what, like, Eric imagines is going to happen, right?
Like, in the future, he will be held up.
Like Einstein, like Newton.
He's just like a genius not appreciated in his time.
But it's absolutely insane that he would invoke that as an argument, right?
Like, have you considered this, Sean?
Yeah, have you considered this?
Yeah, like you said, it is prepubescent in its tone.
And it's like before when he said, how dare you cast explosions?
I don't care what you think.
You suck.
And yet, you know, like, at the time, I thought, like, this is like a child, right?
It's like a strappy teenager, yes.
So, I mean, the arguments are not more sophisticated, but they're certainly expressed with larger words.
And again, this is approaching, like I said, the end of the exchange between Eric and Sean.
But after this debasement, you know, Eric needs to kind of puff himself up.
Again, so you're going to hear a little bit more physics technobabble from Eric and also the kind of trick that he likes to do about implying that, you know, if you just stop being like this, we actually could be friends, right?
So he did this with Mick West.
Here's him trying to do it with Sean Carroll.
The problem, Sean, is that you and I are naturally allied on almost everything.
We're not very far apart.
I don't disagree with the standard model.
I think the standard model is the most beautiful piece of differential geometry before it becomes theoretical physics.
But one of the things that you just said is that it's a classical music, a classical field theory that is not quantized.
As you well know, there was a revolution in the 1970s.
Which said that we blew Hamiltonian analysis and that, in fact, every phase space carrying a symplectic form can be treated.
Locally, as if that symplectic form is the curvature of a line bundle, and the L2 sections of that line bundle form a Hilbert space, and the P and Q coordinate functions can be promoted to operators.
It said that wine is what you get when you stop grape juice from becoming vinegar.
And in fact, Hamiltonian analysis is what happens when you take a physical problem and you stop it from quantizing itself.
That was one of the great errors of our time, that Hamiltonian analysis You know all this stuff, and I know this stuff.
We know the same people.
We probably can work in the same notation.
My guess is that if you and I got over whatever this bizarre tension is between us and buried the hatchet, my guess is that after two days, you'd say, boy, I really just didn't understand what he was saying.
Yeah, isn't that just the cherry on top?
Again, we saw that with Nick West.
First of all, making out that it's this silly tiff, right?
Yes, we've insulted each other.
Things have gotten a bit nasty.
But we could be friends.
We could be friends, right?
We agree on so much.
We speak the same language.
We know the same people, Chris.
We mix it in the same circles, right?
Like we were saying, everything Eric says is geared towards Please take me seriously.
Please take me seriously.
Sean Carroll doesn't care.
I assume he's a normal person.
He comes across as a normal person.
In which case, he doesn't care about being friends with Eric Weinstein.
Eric Weinstein is just a guy on the internet, right?
But this turning a debate into like a psychodrama.
Like a schoolyard, who's friends with who type deal is classic, Eric.
And it's exactly what we saw with Nick West.
And the last thing I'll say, Chris, is that this kind of blowing hot and cold, like being really flagrantly insulting and vile, and then switching back to you made me do that, and I only did it because you hurt me by not doing what I want, which is to take me seriously in Eric's case.
Like that is just a classic tool of manipulative bullies.
And as we saw it with Nick West and it really annoyed me then.
We're seeing it now with Sean Carroll.
Both of them are big boys.
They're big enough to...
Yeah, yeah, it is.
So, you know, that kind of takes them to the end of the exchange around Eric's theory.
They then go on to talk, like peers fire some quickfire questions.
There is a nice illustration, Matt, of just the difference between the way that they respond to questions and one of those responses that maybe it's worth highlighting.
So there's one that's asked about time travel.
Sean Carroll's response is pretty quick, right?
So listen to this for your me.
Sean, will we ever be able to time travel either forward or back?
Yesterday, I time traveled 24 hours into the future, and here I am.
I mean, that's not that hard.
Einstein showed us that there's a trick.
You can even travel into the future faster by either moving near the speed of light or by hanging out in a strong gravitational field like a black hole.
Backwards in time, no.
I don't think that we're going to be able to do it.
I've written papers about it.
It's something that is, I would say, conceivable but not plausible.
We know how it might work in principle, but all of the indications are it's not going to work in practice.
Yeah.
Isn't that just a great answer?
Like, again, remembering that Sean Carroll is talking to a general lay audience and is extraordinarily easy to understand and accurate.
No.
Let's see.
Hi, Eric.
Same question, Eric.
What do you say?
Eric?
Well, as Sean has thoroughly digested my paper, he knows that I believe that there are either five or seven dimensions of time in a 14-dimensional world, which is split five of time, nine of space.
Or seven of time, seven of space.
So when you talk about time travel, it's time's travel.
And only when time is one-dimensional is there an arrow of time.
If there were two dimensions of time, you'd have a whirlpool.
Three dimensions would result in a right-hand rule of time.
These things are technically called orientations.
One of the things that is really interesting about multiple dimensions of time, which leads to something which is very poorly studied called ultra hyperbolic equations, is that you have the opportunity of going back in time without going back through time.
So just as you can play a record and when the stylus comes to the end, On a cassette tape, you have to go back through time.
So my belief is, no, we will not go back through time, but we will have to figure out how to stop thinking in terms of initial conditions, because it is only in the case of a single dimension of time, leading to hyperbolic equations, that you have that luxury.
So I think that times travel.
Is going to be perhaps the most interesting thing to come out when you ask, why should we worry about these things?
Buckle up.
Fascinating.
Fascinating indeed.
Is it though?
Is it fascinating?
Because I came out the end of that like, you know, bored and knowing less than when I started.
Yeah, that is the difference, right?
Like, so that just speaks to their communication style.
And Eric again.
As opposed to Sean, where he's kind of like, oh, you know, there's books written about this topic or whatever, but Eric is like, you know, wants to mention the complex theory and like talk about the fact that he's got, you know, multiple dimensions and it's like a whirlpool, but it's also like, you know, metaphors and so on.
But it's not done to like make it easy for someone to follow.
It's to demonstrate Eric is a very complicated thinker.
And this is, you know, like...
Like this kind of question.
That's right.
Like this quickfire session is, you know, it's meant to be like basic kind of questions to get a basic kind of answer.
And Sean Carroll gives a consensus view, right?
He doesn't take it as an opportunity to go, well, I have this wild idea that maybe they'd launch into it.
Whereas Eric, of course, just takes it as an opportunity to remind everyone that his bespoke Totally wild.
Yeah.
And it resolves everything.
So now, the last part of this, Matt, it's the last, just one or two clips, but I think it's worth noting because, you know, we haven't heard much from Piers Morgan.
He's interjected a couple of times.
He's been enjoying the spectacle, I think, in general about, you know, he's brought these two together.
They're giving him good content by doing, like, fiery exchanges.
This is what he wanted.
But at the end, he's kind of got fed up with the physics chatter.
So this is why he's moved things on to this, you know, what about this eggheads, right?
Like, and Piers can see no difference, you know, between Eric and Schurkauer.
I think for him, it's just like super smart boffins with their different ideas.
He's such a dick.
That he's prepared, that he thinks is important.
And it's a point religion in a way.
So here's his question.
My final question is probably the biggest question I can ask any guest.
I've asked quite a few of them.
I have to say with very limited responses.
So I'm asking two highly intelligent people at this question now, which is I happen to believe in God.
And the reason I do, other than the fact I was reared which is for those who believe in the Big Bang Theory, what was there before the Big Bang?
In other words, what was nothing?
And what was there before nothing?
And because I do not believe a human brain can answer that question, there must be, de facto, a more superior thing out there that can.
The logic doesn't make sense.
His premise is faulty, but also his inference that if humans weren't able to answer that question, that proves there must be a superior being.
That can.
Like, why?
Why must it be?
He doesn't like, you know, he has experience with that, why he believes there's a God.
But like, there's no indication that this is a conclusion that other people, you know, would have to sign off on.
But yeah, so this is his big question, Matt.
Before the Big Bang, there was nothing?
or what was there?
And if people can't answer it, Yeah.
Isn't that like a version of it?
Is it called the prime mover?
Yes.
Yeah.
So an uncaused cause.
Like the bit that Piers hasn't got to, the slight limitation there is that, well, before your God, then who made...
That's right.
Somebody should raise that question.
He'll get an infinite loop and maybe explode.
But yeah, so he wants to pause it.
So he's the cause of the universe.
Because God's magic.
Yeah, so he doesn't need it.
And that's the ultimate trump card.
But in this case, the logic is...
As to what came before the Big Bang.
I love it.
He's kind of created his own version of it, which is interesting.
I just love the scenario where there's all these big brain boffins blathering on about physics, and he's been sitting there patiently, but now he gets to ask them, what about God?
And a very particular version of it, he says, you know, like one of the reasons is I was really Catholic.
That might be perhaps the reason I think, unless this really is the logic in which God can help you, Piers Morgan.
But Sean Carroll's response, Matt.
Let's see how he does with responding to this logic.
Well, I'm glad to be the one who frees you from your religious convictions because the human brain can absolutely tackle that question, and it does so all the time.
I encourage viewers slash listeners to listen to the upcoming episode of my podcast, So the fact that we don't know doesn't mean we can't know.
Those are two very different statements.
Well, if you don't know, you can't know at the moment, surely.
You have to admit you don't know.
I don't know, and we're doing science on it in the hopes that we will know.
With respect, Sean, Sean, with respect, it is utterly impossible.
You will never, as a human being, be able to tell me what was there before nothing.
How can you?
You can't comprehend it, can you?
I come up with a theory.
I show that the theory fits the data.
That's how we do it.
What was there before nothing, then?
Go on, best guess.
We don't know.
My personal favourite theory is there was a pre-existing universe out of which our cosmos arose as a baby universe due to a quantum fluctuation.
What was there before that?
No, it's infinite in time in both directions.
So what was there before...
Yeah.
I wrote a book, if you want to read it, Piers.
I do.
From Eternity to Here.
It's a great book.
I do, but what's there before eternity?
There was no such thing as before eternity.
What is less than minus infinity?
That's not a sensible question to add.
Piers Morgan is so stupid, Chris.
He's so dumb.
I mean, like putting aside the whole atheism versus God.
But that thing that he is so certain that he's found the most incredible, unanswerable gotcha.
I know.
I know Sean Carroll has got a more sophisticated or complex view about cosmology there, but the really conventional one is that the beginning of space-time is basically where the Big Bang is, and it's just not sensible to ask what happened.
Before then.
In the same way of asking, what's north of north?
Yes, that's right.
What's north of the North Pole?
Yeah.
But I mean, I only mentioned that to say that just because you can ask the question, what's north of the North Pole?
Oh, you can't answer that, can you?
See?
Therefore God, right?
Not all questions are well posed.
But even in this case, so, like, this is true, and he does, Sean Carroll's going to go on a little bit to address that kind of point, but Sean Carroll didn't even take that tactic, right?
Like, he actually said, well, we can investigate this question, and I have some theories about, you know, what things may have come.
Might involve universes, you know, with infinite dimensions and whatnot, right?
No, no, Chris, we don't know now.
He doesn't know now, so he can't know.
It's impossible.
Can't be done.
Yeah, I know.
So there's that.
But so then, you know, when Pierce kept insisting this is a gotcha, like, because you can't answer it, can you?
Right?
Like, then Sean Carroll responds a bit more.
Yeah, but I think it's a cop-out by you, if you don't mind me saying this very respectfully, to say that something is infinite, because if you're saying it's infinite, you don't have to answer the question.
You've just made that up.
You don't know it's infinite.
This very often happens in the progress of human knowledge, that a question that we thought was an interesting one becomes not answered but shown to be uninteresting because we get a deeper understanding.
See that?
I'm sorry.
I'm going to come to you, Eric, on this.
That seems to me a very pompous answer.
That is basically trying to apply superior intelligence to a response to a lesser mortal by saying that my attempt to get this question answered is so stupid that there should be no need by the brainpower in front of me to answer it.
No, it's exactly the opposite of that.
I don't know why people are trying to psychoanalyze me and think about what I'm thinking of them.
What I'm saying is, As Eric.
Yeah.
He didn't say, he was saying, we can pose these good questions.
And as we find more information out, we might find out that like the question that we thought was, you know, important, it actually...
It's literally not saying everyone's an idiot for asking the question.
That's even a theme in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chris.
All the people go to the great machine and they wanted to answer the question, what's the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
And it turns out it's not a good question.
You know what I mean?
This is a common thing.
There is such a thing as a badly posed question.
You have a better understanding and you realize that And Pierre's response to be like, oh, excuse me, this is extremely pompous of you to say that, you know, this is a question that can't big brain geniuses.
Like he's the one that's been constantly calling them big brain buffing geniuses.
And now he gets like all offended about it.
And again, it's like a shower for it.
That he had, right?
It's based on nothing except him feeling smugly satisfied.
And actually, he is the pompous one, assuming that this thought bubble he's had is something that is beyond anybody to ever answer or respond to, and it proves that God exists.
That is a pompous inference to me.
And it's an insulting one for like people who don't believe in God.
Right.
Because Sean Carroll isn't saying at any point, He's just saying, look, the evidence doesn't support that claim because we may very well be able to answer this with physics and evidence at enough time.
But yeah, and Piers is just furious that he would dare say that maybe it isn't a well-posed question as we get more information.
I think this is the theme of this episode, Chris, which is people who have done very little work on a particular topic getting furious and aggrieved with the people who have for not taking their asinine shower thoughts seriously.
Sean Carroll has written books about this stuff, but he's not giving a one-sentence answer that pleases Piers Morgan.
So Piers Morgan claims that he's a pompous asshole.
Yeah, yeah.
And now let's just, for contrast and to finish, Matt, let's hear Eric's response to the same prompt, right?
So Sean Carroll, he didn't do well.
He did not please the great, you know, lesser can of Piers Morgan.
So Piers, you know, flips over.
Well, Eric, what do you got to say about this?
Can you rescue the situation?
And let's see what Eric goes with.
All right, Eric, am I mad?
No, I mean, look, one of the things I like, Pierce, is that you invite me on this program often not to do battle, as we heard in the previous segment.
So let me try something as an offering to the good Dr. Carroll, and he can tell me whether this matches anything, because I also share atheism at some level along with him.
What I believe is that you're conflating three different category problems.
One, you're talking about something observational, which might terminate at what we would call the surface of last scattering, the thing that we cannot see beyond with our instruments.
That takes place along the lines of something, let's say, called the cosmological model, which is a reduction of Einstein's field equations assuming greater symmetry.
That is a 1,3 problem where you have one dimension of time, three of space, and you can prove that there's something called an essential singularity in the center of a black hole, a Schwarzschild singularity, and an initial singularity in what would be called a Friedman-Robertson-Walker metric.
So that is a map of the territory that we are trying to observe.
But there's a third thing, which is an assembly sequence, which also has an ordinal concept of development, which could be...
What is it that built the manifold so that time could progress?
Now, the thing that's truly radical about geometric unity, and I think Sean would probably agree with this if he's read it at all, and I'm not sure that he has, is that it is the only theory I know that begins from almost nothing and tries to get, and by theory of everything, we don't mean all knowledge.
We mean a complete set of the rules of the universe.
What it says is that four degrees of freedom are all that is necessary for the quark, lepton, CKM, PMS, etc., etc., PNMS structure of the universe.
That basically sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, or treble, mid, bass, and reverb is all that's necessary to create a universe.
The point of a theory of everything, which is almost never discussed.
Well, that's...
I cut it there.
It goes on.
I'm just imagining Piers Morgan's eyes rolling backwards in his head.
Did he like this answer, Chris?
Oh, he liked it.
Yeah, he liked that.
What?
He responded, you know, because the thing is, it's too complex, right?
So whereas Sean Carroll responded clearly, you know, saying, well, you know, I can't.
And Eric finishes off by saying, you know.
Piers does the thing of saying, ultimately, we can't know, though, right?
You're right.
And Eric's like, yes.
And then he's like, well, we all agree that we can't ultimately.
And I couldn't understand.
I couldn't follow all of that.
But there you heard that.
That's probably the best example of Eric just waffling on referencing topics that there's no way Piers Morgan understands.
And he brings it back to, he takes a dig at John Carroll.
He probably hasn't read my work.
My theory of everything is actually the solution to your question.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And it's all, like, this is the clearest thing.
Sean tried to answer his question straightforwardly, and he got told off.
Eric blabbers like a maniac about, like, a hundred different things.
And this is kind of more satisfying to Pierce because it implies that his question is very deep.
And complex.
And, you know, this is the kind of complex stuff.
He can't follow it, but it's a good question.
Yeah.
It's a good question.
Yeah, that's right.
He started off with flattering Piers Morgan at the very beginning.
That's right.
And wouldn't be so crude as to disagree with him.
Yeah.
Look, this is why there's no justice in this world, Chris.
This is why we cannot have nice things because Eric's behavior here, it is, as you said, it's what Piers Morgan wants to just hear some technical babble that he doesn't understand.
Right?
But it's all very mysterious and very smart sounding.
And to have his own perspectives kind of respected.
Right?
Yes.
That's what he wants.
You have someone like Sean Carroll who is doing his best to give a straight answer to, you know, let's face it, a very difficult question, one that nobody really knows the answer to.
But he's giving an honest and straightforward answer, which is not the one that people often want.
Here's Morgan once.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, this is why we can't have nice things.
No, it's right.
And the very last thing is that Piers Morgan suggests that, like, they've both been talking bollocks at the high level, like, that he can't follow.
But maybe what they all need to do is just hang out and get a beer and they'll realise that they're all good friends.
I appreciate you coming together.
I realise you are at loggerheads about a few things.
I suspect, as Eric said, Sean, if you spent a couple of days together over a few pints of foaming British ale, Whatever your tipple may be, you probably find you end up best buddies.
And I would love to do that interview if you ever do that.
So thank you both very much for joining me.
Thanks.
Thanks for having us, Sean.
Thanks for doing this.
Maybe a cocktail instead of some lager.
A bit bitter.
Just bitter, to be clear.
But thank you both very much.
Wow.
Amazing.
It's that thing, Matt.
You know, it's the guru sphere.
Always rotates on the notion that interpersonal friendship is actually ultimately what it's about.
There are differences, you know, they're just great big minds colliding about big ideas.
But, you know, Sean Carroll and Eric Weinstein, you know, they're both equally blathering about ideas without explaining things for the layperson.
And that's not true.
It's not true.
Nor was Sean Carroll the rude, aggressive person.
And nor would it matter if they met in person and could have a pint together because it's such a low bar and it wouldn't change anything about the evidence that Eric has offered.
It wouldn't matter.
That's right.
It would not matter.
Yeah, yeah.
It's pretty sad the way that, like, journalism of Piers Morgan.
Of the Piers Morgan variety.
Of the variety.
But, you know, the way it intersects, right, with...
And, you know, it's just really sad that I think there are good examples of it.
And I think Sean Carroll's Mindscape is one where you have interesting guests and you have accessible, like public lectures, public conversations, which are meaningful and are at the right level.
And then you have a bunch of operators who are planning Flo-beating narcissists, whose intent and goal is not to inform, educate in any way, shape, or form.
It's really just a self-aggrandize.
And they do pretty well in this ecosystem.
Oh, they do fantastic.
And the only other point I'll make to finish, Matt, is like, I saw some people that said, like, why would Sean Carroll do this?
Why would he put himself for this?
But I actually respect Sean Carroll for doing this and handling it as well as he did.
Because despite the fact that people will, you know, be led along by Eric and his framing of things, Sean Carroll represented himself very well.
He didn't let himself be pushed around.
He didn't play into the interpersonal dynamics.
And he made a strong critique of Eric.
And for those who are willing to look critically at it, they will have noticed that Eric was puffing himself up, being aggressive, deflecting, and all these kind of things.
So I think it is much better That Sean Carroll is there and willing, you know, to come across as a reasonable person and present the mainstream perspective versus Eric and some other, you know, like guru, physics, or Kurt Jemungle.
Yeah, that's right.
less scrupulous physics influencer, the kind of person that Eric Sabine Hossenfelder.
Yeah, yeah, that would be less...
Less good in many ways.
Yeah, no, it is important.
I mean, there are precious few academics who are willing and able to do that.
Sean did, I think, impeccably.
I can't imagine somebody handling Eric better.
and I thought Mick West did a great job too.
And yeah, I think I agree with you because if people like Sean Carroll don't step up and take those slots on a stupid show like Piers Morgans, then they will get filled by...
Yeah, the Kirchheim uncles of this world.
Or if we're very lucky, the Sabine Hossenfelders of this world.
But I much prefer it with Sean Carroll representing there.
Yeah, so there we go.
Well, we covered it, Matt.
We were asked by many people to do so, and we have done so.
None of it is surprising for us in the way that Eric behaves.
It's absolutely in line with how he usually behaves.
But it is a kind of paradigmatic illustration.
Of lots of the dynamics that we see in the Guru's form or generally, the Weinstein brothers collectively and in Eric in particular.
This is his modus operandi.
So yeah, there you go.
Kind of vintage decoding the Guru's material.
Thank you, Eric.
Yeah, thank you, Eric, for again demonstrating all of the things that we don't like to see.
But it is a useful lesson for people.
And if you ever run into someone in real life, Get out!
Quickly!
Run!
Run far away!
Pour the cocktail in their head and spread it off.
That's right.
Or just distract them off a cocktail.
Good job, Matt.
We'll be back.
This has, as per usual, not been a short.
Mini decoded.
But, you know, it's at least one hour shorter than they usually are.
