Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Slow Death of Scientific Innovation | Gregory Chaitin

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout checkout making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms. There's also something called Shopify magic. Your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly

Starting point is 00:00:35 behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Shopify.com slash theories. Your team requested a ride, but this time, not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your team to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your team to your Uber account today. To be a genius, you've got to be crazy. You've got to be crazy because you have to back a new idea at a time when there isn't enough evidence. Is our current academic system actively suppressing the next Freeman-Dyson or Newton?

Starting point is 00:02:08 What does current academic system even mean? Today we're joined by Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician and a computer scientist who published his first groundbreaking paper at 15 and went on to become one of the founders of algorithmic information theory. He believes we're in a crisis of innovation. Dean and went on to become one of the founders of algorithmic information theory. He believes we're in a crisis of innovation. Chaitin argues that modern academia is suffocating scientific creativity. We've spoken to Gregory Chaitin before about his inventive work in meta-biology and algorithmic

Starting point is 00:02:39 complexity, but today we're diving into even deeper waters of his perspective at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies. Chaitin pulls no punches in diagnosing what he sees as a terminal illness in how we pursue scientific knowledge. It's not science that's wrong, it's how it's being squelched and distorted in the modern university system. Gregory, let's talk about contradictions in mathematics. You know, contradictions in mathematics are nothing new. Cantor's theory of infinite sets was full of contradictions. Bertrand Russell, before he wrote the Principia Mathematica with Whitehead

Starting point is 00:03:20 in an attempt to give mathematics a more secure foundation, kept writing about different paradoxes and contradictions in mathematics, which is why he proposed to use logic as a basis for mathematics. And that was the reason that Hilbert said the salvation of mathematics will be formal axiomatic systems, that you can analyze from the outside metamathematically and show that they don't need the contradictions and that they're complete, that they enable you to prove everything that is true. Unfortunately, it turns out you can't do that for all of math, right, due to Goettl's incompleteness theorems. But Goettl's incompleteness theorem doesn't show that mathematics is contradictory. What it shows is that no formal, no very safe formalization of mathematics will be complete.

Starting point is 00:04:12 But in fact, in practice, it's good software engineering now. Mathematicians are coming up with proof checkers that they use in their actual mathematical research and these, like Lean, I think is the name of one of them, these are actually like formal systems that have been engineered in a way that they can be actually be used by working mathematicians to check the work they're doing. So I think that if you're going to say that mathematics is dying because there are contradictions, you know, if you want to attack pure mathematics, there are easier ways to do it. For example, you can say 1234567 to infinity, you

Starting point is 00:04:52 don't believe in that, you know, who's going to see an infinite, right? infinite infinite set. Well, I think that's what Yoshi Bach does. Yoshi Bach and other computationalists art or they generally tend to be finite-ists as well. Yeah, well, it's possible the physical universe is finite, but the mathematical universe is definitely infinite. Now, where is the mathematical universe? You may say it's in the mind of

Starting point is 00:05:18 the mathematician or you may believe that it has some kind of reality in a platonic world and that the physical world perhaps is built out of math, out of this Platonic world. These are all fundamental issues in philosophy. But yeah, when I was a young student, there were constructivists who wanted all of mathematics to be done with existing proofs that were constructed. They didn't like, they didn't want you to prove something by assuming that it's not the case and then deriving a contradiction. And that's a very common strategy in pure mathematics. It can be brilliantly applied

Starting point is 00:06:01 in many cases. And Eric Bishop was one of the people who worked on this. And then with the computers, there's a big incentive for constructive proofs, because it's nice if you say that a partial differential equation has a solution and you prove it by assuming it doesn't and getting a contradiction that doesn't help you to find the solution. So people with computers who want to actually calculate the solutions are essentially doing constructive proofs of existence, rather than reductio ad absurdum proofs. The kind of mathematics I do deals with things that you can't calculate. A constructivist will say the halting probability doesn't exist because you can't calculate it. But that's precisely why it's interesting, because you can't calculate it. But you can say it doesn't exist.

Starting point is 00:06:57 Okay. It's like a flying horse if you like, you know. It's a mythological object. Yes, like there's plenty of fiction that's interesting, but we're trying to describe the non-fictional world, the actual world. Right. Do you, as when you're doing conceptual work, you can sort of choose the world. You can mathematics, you can sort of create the world you want to work in,

Starting point is 00:07:19 want to do research and you, you sort of postulate and create a situation that then you explore. Now which some mathematicians say, well, that means we're more fortunate than physicists who have to worry about the physical world, which may not be as beautiful as imagined worlds. But in fact, with super string theory, the physicists don't care anymore about whether it applies to this world, you know, 22 dimensions, remember all of that 26. Yeah. And it's certainly beautiful mathematics, whether it's physics. You know, I knew a guy, Brian Green, I helped him to get a summer job at IBM, because people told me he was brilliant. And he was. And when I when I heard that he had gotten a professorship at Columbia, it was described to me like this. It was a joint professorship between the physics and the math department. Because the math department thought what he was

Starting point is 00:08:15 doing was physics and the physics department thought that he was doing was math. And the answer is it's neither. Interesting. Brian Green super strength theory. Well, anyway, he's published books on, on that topic. Yes. I've spoken to him on the podcast. Yeah. He has the, what does he call it?

Starting point is 00:08:34 The world science fair or something in New York. Correct. He and his partner who is from the TV world organized, they, organized, they had me on a panel once with Marvin Minsky, not that long before his death and some other interesting people. Oh, and Rebecca Goldstein was on the panel also. Yes. I also interviewed Rebecca. Oh, did you? Yeah, about Gödel's incompleteness theorem. My first question was, I believe something

Starting point is 00:09:03 like tell me about Gödel's incompleteness theorems. And then she was like, oh, that's insightful of you to say theorems, because most people just think there's one. Yeah, I think the first is more significant, at least for my work. But, but Rebecca in her, in her book says something more important that she considers Gödel a philosopher, not a mathematician. He published very few papers because he only wanted to publish work that was philosophically significant for a mathematician, his output was small. But for a philosopher, it wasn't. But he was a philosopher who didn't want it.

Starting point is 00:09:39 He was very shy. He wanted to avoid controversies and philosophy is only controversy. As I'm sure you've noticed with the different opinions on your podcast. A lot of his nicest essays were only published posthumously. He would do version after version, even correct the proofs and not authorize being published. So Goethe only published philosophical papers for which he had mathematical proofs and therefore they couldn't be there could be no argument about whether the result was was correct or not. But you can still argue about what its meaning was. And people still do. Yeah, Rebecca has a nice book on Götter's Inklopolis. I once was in a castle in a schloss somewhere

Starting point is 00:10:30 or other at a small dinner with Rebecca's ex husband. There's a fit. He's a physicist who's worked on Bomi and physics. That's physics with hidden variables. Right? Well, it's a personal joke. I shouldn't repeat it. But I actually rather liked Rebecca's book, not only her book on ghetto, little book on ghetto. She has a novel that that I like called The Mind Body Problem. She wrote a book about Spinoza, but it's not fiction.

Starting point is 00:11:01 The mind body problem is fiction, Rebecca Goldstein. And that was, you know, for a while, one test I would have with every young lady that I hoped might turn into a girlfriend, this was a long time ago, would be to give her, the candidate, a copy of Rebecca Goldstein's book and see what impression it made. This was not a, this was, as you can imagine, not a good, not a good way to seduce or... Well, it was a filtering mechanism for you. Yeah, it was no good as a filtering mechanism, but I tried a few times. It never, it never, it never worked as I expected. She had a nice little biography of Spinoza. I thought uh it nice what makes it nice is it is short and non-technical.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Ditto with Gödel. To be clear for people who want to know the math, the Gödel sentence asserts its own unprovability in a consistent formal system. So it's written on screen here and it basically means if this statement is true then it asserts that it's not provable. So hence it's not provable and if it's false well then the negation of it is true and therefore it must be provable. However it's asserting that the g sentence itself must be provable thus we have inconsistency. Now this fact, although seemingly obscure and arcane, is something that mathematicians, philosophers and even physicists are still reeling from almost 100 years later. It means our formal knowledge will always be incomplete. There will always be facts

Starting point is 00:12:42 out of reach by what even our most well-defined science can capture. She did a number of works of fiction. The one that resonated with me was the mind-body problem, talking about the funny kinds of people who want to do fundamental research in math or in physics. But the problem with the mind-body problem is it deals with the mathematician who was precocious was a child prodigy and done some great work and somehow the magic stopped. Magic stopped and he couldn't have any new ideas and this this sort of upset me because i was also i had some of my best ideas when I was a teenager. I wondered, is this it? Is it over? Will I ever have another good idea in my life? Her book was very dramatic. This young lady who was interested in philosophy married this famous mathematician only to discover that he considered himself a failure

Starting point is 00:13:46 because since just before he married her, he hadn't had any new ideas from that point on. It ruined their marriage, as you might imagine. So this is like a writer staring at a blank piece of paper, right? Or sitting at the typewriter. So that's a problem with creativity. You know, magic has to strike. You wonder, will you get a new idea? And they don't come all the time. But I think I've been fairly lucky.

Starting point is 00:14:21 So in your case, did you feel like you've lost your creativity? Did no new ideas occur to you in your adulthood? No I don't think that's the case you know as my wife Virginia points out very often even in public talks I say that's it you know I passed the torch to you young people go ahead I don't think I'll come up with any new ideas and that's not what happens actually Do you think it's the case that as you age that the amount of new novel ideas that are fruitful Tend to become less and less or is it that you become a harsher critic? So just as many new ideas occur to you, but you shut them down in your own head or critic, so just as many new ideas occurred to you, but you shut them down in your own head.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Whereas when you were younger, you had the conviction to follow an idea. And even if you were older, if you were to follow one of those ideas that got hammered down, it would have produced something. Yeah, well, what you're saying is pretty, it's pretty good. I think it's really a question. Of course, if you study too much and you get immersed in the current paradigm and you learn too much about it, then you're trapped. You become an expert in

Starting point is 00:15:30 the current paradigm and then you're in a prison. But it's really a question of personality, it seems to me. The kind of person who goes against the current and comes up with new ideas, that personality is not going to change with age. You have to be unconventional. You have to not care what other people think and be willing to go out on a limb. You know, I have my definition of genius. You see, to be a genius, you've got to be crazy. You've got to be crazy because you have to back a new idea at a time when there isn't

Starting point is 00:16:07 enough evidence. If there were a lot of evidence, everybody would believe in it and it wouldn't be a new idea. So you're going out on a limb, you're all by yourself there. And if you're lucky, the new idea is correct and you're a genius. And if not, you're just a crazy person, an eccentric who didn't amount to anything. So I think I've been lucky. I think Stephen Wolfram has been lucky, but there are people who don't like the work we've done.

Starting point is 00:16:33 The establishment doesn't like the work we've done, but I think no one can deny that Steven and I are not following the fashion. We are doing a body of work. Doesn't follow the fashion and i think that's a good in itself because i think we we we are an example that is possible even in our current. Very heavily controlled research environment very bureaucratic only concerned with money, progress reports, deliverables, milestones, grant requests. Even in our current very inhospitable environment for creativity, it is possible not to, you can't go be against the system, but you can sort of go outside the system, you know, go around the system. Stephen did it by creating his own company. And he's a genius that funds his research. Very few people can do that, obviously. And I did it by having a day job, which was I was good at software

Starting point is 00:17:38 engineering. And my night job, actually, it wasn't my night job was fundamental research. IBM was happy to, at that time, was happy to let me spend some of my time doing research if I was doing something useful for the company. Now that was a period long ago and I think now it's considered unacceptable that the stockholders will burn you alive if you let employees do that. But at that time, IBM was the only, was the computer company in the world, you know. And they had the luxury of letting some, allowing some blue sky research, some done by their researchers.

Starting point is 00:18:20 So when I was at the Watson Research Center, it was delightful, but I understand now that it's considered that everything has to be useful. And in fact, I think the way the research, I don't know, I haven't been in touch with them for a long time, but the way the research division was starting to operate when I left, when I retired from IBM, was that you had to get external funding for a project. In the days when IBM was very prosperous, the corporation paid for the whole budget of the research division and we had a lot of freedom. It was a golden sandbox, as they used to call it. But at the end, to do a project, you had to find a product division that was willing to invest money, basically, so that you would help them develop a new product, or maybe it was the US government. Most of the money

Starting point is 00:19:16 had to come from outside the corporation. And what that means is basically you're a hired gun. It's not curiosity driven research. You're doing things, you're prost hired gun. It's not curiosity driven research. You're doing things, you're prostituting yourself, doing things that other people want for practical purposes instead of following your dreams or your curiosity, which is the best thing for doing research. Or, you know, IBM research had some people doing fundamental physics when I was there, totally blue sky basic research. But there were also people who were doing

Starting point is 00:19:56 technology projects, which was great fun. I was on such a project. And it's great fun to create a new computer with a new operating system, new compiler, the whole thing from scratch. It's like having a child because it works. You can use it afterwards. But the problem then is selling it to the corporation and a new product, a new kind of computer based on new ideas competes with the existing product line. And you can't predict how well it'll sell. And so people called IBM Research a golden sandbox because we came up with a new way of building a computer and new software, new everything.

Starting point is 00:20:39 And the corporation really didn't want to pursue it as a product, but by paying us salaries and letting us do that, they made sure we didn't go to pursue it as a product. But by paying us salaries and letting us do that, they made sure we didn't go to a startup that would have competed with IBM. There was a genius there who he would go around telling people his ideas for you for new computer architectures, just to make sure that they weren't his ideas weren't totally squelched. So innovation is a tough business and you've got to be a little crazy to do it because you're fighting the system. What if someone says, look, you can be outside the system and you can make a contribution,

Starting point is 00:21:17 but that's no guarantee. It may not even be a necessary condition. It's certainly not sufficient. But let's say we think it's necessary, then someone points out examples where, well, we have ADS-CFT that came from inside. What is that? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with it. From the holographic duality, ADS-CFT. Ah yes. Conformal field theory. Well, that's very pretty, but it doesn't apply to this world. Yes, right. The point is that it's an innovation and it also has applications in condensed

Starting point is 00:21:48 matter physics. That has implication in the real world. And then also then there's quantum computing and quantum error correcting codes. So those are inside the academy. And earlier you argued that certain mathematical results may not have a direct application in our physical world, but they could be relevant in some, say, mathematical realm. And if we accept that as a premise, then the critique that, hey, it doesn't apply to the real world, that loses its force. Well, that's a controversial topic, especially because I knew some of the people who created quantum computing. I regard that as technology, not as fundamental innovation.

Starting point is 00:22:30 But it's true, the reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of qubits, it's the same old quantum mechanics from the 1920s, but it feels and looks rather different when you do quantum mechanics in terms of qubits and quantum computing. So that has been, I agree that has been something. But I want more than that because you see it's just a reformulation of 1920s quantum mechanics. At this point you may be wondering, like myself, why Greg continually puts the 1920s as the latest revolution in physics. I emailed Greg afterward, saying, Dear Gregory, in our talk, you mentioned that the foundations haven't changed since the 1920s.

Starting point is 00:23:15 However, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there were significant developments such as Electroweak Unification, Confinement, and QED. Did you mean to say that there has been no new innovation since the 1970s? Greg then responded, and I have permission to use his voice here. You have a right to disagree, of course, but seen from a vast distance, the basic quantum framework, the real revolution, was the 1920s. At least that's how I see it. To me, the topics you mention are just details.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Best, Greg. It's just a reformulation of 1920s quantum mechanics. It's clothed in a different way, but there is no fundamental new phenomenon there. Hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point

Starting point is 00:24:18 of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms. There's also something called Shopify magic. Your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having, Rothy's, and Brooklynin.

Starting point is 00:25:05 If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. You know, you want to poke reality and get it to squeak. It's not easy to find an experiment where nature shows some new phenomenon that you never imagined before.

Starting point is 00:25:47 And then it's tough to convince people that the experiment isn't flawed, doesn't suffer from noise or other problems, and to get it published is tough. If there isn't a theory that accounts for it. I'm, I, listen, I agree, I'm a contrarian, I'm a romantic, I don't believe in big science. But there are things that big science has accomplished and that the current system has accomplished. And by the way, the person who did that work that you mentioned the hell,

Starting point is 00:26:21 whatever it was, I think he was an Argentina, is it Malta Santa or something? Yes, right. was. I think he was in Argentina, is it Maldacena or something? Yes, right, exactly. Who's now at the Institute for Advanced Studies, but he studied in the physics department where I had friends long ago when I was teaching at the University of Buenos Aires many, many years ago. Another thing, I don't like the system, it's like a giant prison, frankly, and young researchers are, they can't giant prison, frankly. And young researchers, they can't get married, they can't have children, they can't have new ideas, they have to keep publishing. They don't earn any money, they have to keep moving from institution to institution,

Starting point is 00:26:56 constantly publishing papers, very often, fairly trivial papers with only small incremental fairly trivial papers with only small incremental advances. I think that's ridiculous. Another aspect of the system is writing books doesn't count. Another thing is I knew a professor in Argentina, there was a professor who was a wonderful teacher of mathematics, the students loved him. He created a whole school, but he wasn't a researcher. He wrote beautiful books on the history of mathematics.

Starting point is 00:27:28 So forcing everybody to constantly be publishing a stream of research papers is ridiculous. I think if somebody is a wonderful teacher, that's a contribution. You know, and the consistent publisher paradigm, I think is ridiculous. And the result is that we're publishing a lot of trivial stuff, you know, that it's not worth the trouble to try to read. I think small is beautiful and there ought to be more freedom and more imagination. And they've taken the fun out of it. As Einstein said about doing research, you have to do it from curiosity or, you know, or from love. curiosity or from love. If you're forced to do research, it's like forcing a wolf to eat steak. Yes, a wolf is very hungry and loves steak, but if you keep constantly forcing the wolf to eat steak, it won't want, it's going to get sick of it. So this business of forcing people to produce a constant stream of relatively unimportant

Starting point is 00:28:29 research so they can't stop to change fields or to try anything really risky because it might lead to a hiccup in the stream of constant publications. I think this is all bad. And basically, they've taken the fun out of it. You know, what's the point? I wouldn't want to be a researcher in the current environment. I'm a rebel, I want to be creative, I want to have fun. If it's not fun, it means you shouldn't be doing it. You know, Elon Musk says, why do you wake up in the morning if it's just solving problems? But if you say

Starting point is 00:29:06 we're going to get to Mars, that's a challenge that can excite your imagination and make you feel it's worth something. But the current system, I don't know, I feel it's it's sort of gruesome. It's sort of like a prison. And I don't like it. But amazingly enough, some young people managed to do good work in this horrendous environment. I admire them greatly, but I couldn't do it, is all I can say. Greg, do you have a way of differentiating which philosophers will give you insight into something mathematical or physical?

Starting point is 00:29:40 So for instance, Kant may give rise to something physical or mathematical, but it's less clear to me that Tolstoy has some claim on the Church-Turing thesis, for instance. Well, Tolstoy doesn't. Yes, right. So, is there some way that you can look at, so you can look at Leibniz and say, okay, well, let me read the philosophy of Leibniz. That may inspire me mathematically. Well, it did.

Starting point is 00:30:04 Yes, yeah. Is there some criteria that you have to a priori sort out which philosophers are more likely to give you ideas? Yes. I resonate with fundamental new ideas. I was good as a young student. I had piles of books and I wouldn't read the book from cover to cover. I could very quickly see if there was a new idea in it or if it was more of the same warmed up soup. So I have this feeling for when there's a gem there, a new idea. Now you were talking about this business of publish or perish shows how bad the current system is.

Starting point is 00:30:41 Another thing that shows how rotten the current system is, is shut up and calculate. Right. You said that that was suicidal and I'd like you to explain why. Intellectually suicidal. Well, if you read about Einstein and his life, or you look at Schrodinger, these Einstein, all these people von Neumann, all these people knew philosophy. It was part of the German speaking cultural world. They read philosophy. And just doing meaning, just being good at doing meaningless calculations. I mean, yes, that's a talent. But you've got to think about what you're doing and you've got to ask is this the only way?

Starting point is 00:31:27 Could there be another approach? Am I really asking the right question? For example, Einstein's, his reaction to the particle physics, you know, the zoo of all the different particles, hundreds of particles, depends how you define particle, right? Some very briefly. He said he just wanted to understand the electron Really understand the electron the electron is problematical. It's a singularity and It's problematically in classical physics and it's problematical in quantum physics

Starting point is 00:32:00 Because if the electron is a point there's infinite energy in the field around the electron according to classical Maxwellian electromagnetics. And in quantum mechanics also, it doesn't solve the problem, you know. So there's also the question of if you say the electron is a little sphere, then it's going faster than the speed of light. It's rotating faster than the speed of light, it turns out. So whatever you, if you say it's a point, you get into trouble. If you say it's a rotating sphere, there were things called Poincare forces having to do with electrons or spheres that didn't work out. So guess what? Physicists don't ask this question anymore

Starting point is 00:32:46 because they know that nobody has an answer. So you ask the questions where it's safe, where the calculations, you can do calculations that are meaningful and you avoid the questions which give you infinities, you know, series that don't converge. But technically that means your theory is inconsistent or incomplete, right? So the way it works is you just don't ask the questions that get you in trouble, but those are the interesting questions actually, the questions that get you in trouble in my opinion. This is why Einstein just said all I want to understand is the electron, really understand electron and he had no interest in in in the particle zoo. He called it now

Starting point is 00:33:32 Marie-Galman had a completely different kind of mind from Einstein I I had the misfortune of meeting him Good fortune or misfortune the first thing he does when you meet him is he tells you what language your name comes from and what it really means. You know, he knows dozens of languages. He has an encyclopedic mind and this was the kind of mind that could deal with the particles in. So I had no idea where my name came from.

Starting point is 00:34:04 I then went to my dad and said, is this correct what he told me? My dad said, yeah, as a matter of fact, actually it is. So it's a completely different kind of mind. Einstein was only interested in very deep questions. Deep questions like, is the physical optics continuous or are they discrete? And his own attitude to his own work was, well, it's alternative, you know. So alternative, we'll see how much survives in the physics of the future. He didn't take it that seriously, you know. So when you make a religion out of the current theories, then you're never going to come

Starting point is 00:34:45 up with a new theory. So it's important to break the rules or to, how do you say, be an iconoclast. You have to be willing to do that to find something new. It could be that some people have been trying. They're saying there is no dark matter. The equations for gravity are wrong. That's a possibility, right? Modified, what is it, M-O-N-D, Newtonian dynamics, for example, there are different versions of this. Correct. You know, but they're all very ad hoc. And, you know, you you ask yourself, how can they be justified? Now, there are ideas like the universe is built out of information which

Starting point is 00:35:26 are very provocative and quantum that I believed in for a long time as an interesting topic for research and quantum information theory and quantum computation is a major step in that direction in my opinion but is that does that mean that all of physical reality is information is consciousness information? You know, I've tried to see how far I could take that that point of view. So you've got to be willing to go out on a limb and try new ideas, but the funding agencies will never give you a grant for something. What would be meant by consciousness is information? Well, you can measure consciousness in terms of information, saying how much information are you conscious of? And so you can use measures of information as a way of measuring the amount of consciousness. I don't know. You know,

Starting point is 00:36:19 there's a nice book by David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, is in search of a fundamental theory. This was maybe it's 20 years ago. And he has a whole chapter on information theory. I think that's a very provocative book. You know, maybe in 200 years, we'll understand more about about such topics, you know. But for now, they are they they're pretty elusive. But if you just stick to stuff we know how to do, you're never going to find anything new. One has to think out of the box, I think. It helps if you're independently wealthy, because if you've got to get research grants to survive and not starve to death, you're going to have to do, you're going to have to dance to the tune of the Piper, right? You're not going to be able to do what you want.

Starting point is 00:37:08 So the way Stephen Wolf himself, that is he made his own very successful company. So he can now get the problem with that is I've known some people who've done that, but then they had no time left to do their research. Right. They said, I'm leaving academia. I'm going to make my own company and make money and then I can do with that money All the research I want well, they managed to do the first step, but they never it's a full-time job They never got back to doing research

Starting point is 00:37:33 Steven is unusual and that he he did get back to doing fundamental research Well, this can't be the solution for everyone. No, it can't be So for the young person who's watching, who wants to go into the universities or wants to contribute something large, something innovative, what is the advice? My advice would be follow your curiosity. Pay no attention to what's fashionable. You know, at the end of your life, you life you said what did i do with my life. I'm. You tried and maybe succeeded a little bit.

Starting point is 00:38:12 In doing something new. If you just follow the. The current fashion it doesn't matter whether you succeed or not you really accomplish very little. No with your life so it's a question of what do you find meaningful? I would tell them fight the system, but you can't fight the system. It's bigger than we are, right? What you can try to do is ignore the system. So one way is to do your research as a hobby and So one way is to do your research as a hobby and, you know, make pizzas or something as a living. Max Stegmark, I know, had a steady stream of sort of routine astrophysical papers, good papers, dealing with analyzing large quantities of astronomical data, good stuff. And then he had the papers that may have been closer

Starting point is 00:39:06 to his heart, which were very speculative, like the question of a multiverse of all possible mathematical laws. That's an extreme multiverse. But he was doing solid work. So you have to have enough energy to do both things at the same time. When you're young, it is possible. It is possible to do more routine work to survive or be a computer program,

Starting point is 00:39:36 or program, or have some other way of earning a living, and then have your art. You know, there are a lot of amateur musicians who are very good. Sometimes for a musician it's very tough to survive financially. I knew one musician, he had various church choirs that he directed, he would tutor people who wanted piano classes. It's not easy when you when you go off in your own direction. But I think a life like that is well, if you believe in Dharma, I don't know, some some of us feel a need to do this kind of thing. We we don't want to be just so how do

Starting point is 00:40:20 you see cogs in the machine, or just like soldiers following orders. But it's it's tough, you have to be lucky to get away So how do you see cogs in the machine, or just like soldiers following orders? But it's tough. You have to be lucky to get away with it, right? And the fact that you're unconventional doesn't mean you're going to make great art or you're going to discover a new kind of physics. But at least you give it a try. And I think that is something that one can be proud of, that one gave it a shot or not one succeeds i mean there is this old statement that you if you have an ambitious research project.

Starting point is 00:40:52 You may succeed and solve it but so what if you have an extremely ambitious research project you may never solve it but you're bound to find interesting things along the way. But you're bound to find interesting things along the way. Great. Professor, do you have any advice for myself? I have this channel here. I want to contribute to the field. I don't want it to just be where I'm speaking to someone and then passively some information is conveyed. And maybe there are some nuggets here and there that creep up from the conversation and that spurs some research. So that's already happened.

Starting point is 00:41:24 A tiny modicum in your case with the extended evolutionary synthesis the conversation and that spurs some research. So that's already happened a tiny Modicum in your case with the extended evolutionary synthesis and Tim model in and there are a variety of other examples, but I want to Actively contribute more to research Using this not just this podcast but this whole channel this whole project this whole theories of everything project that I have So what advice do you have? Well, you're making a valuable contribution. You know, people in the system can't even write books because you don't get credit for writing a book. You only get credit for writing refereed papers in high-impact journals.

Starting point is 00:42:01 Writing a book is a hobby. People used to write write books wonderful mathematicians and physicists used to write books. And they know it is you get no credit for you may do it anyway because you have nothing better to do you know the end of your career anyway i think you're contributing. Because you're getting people to question the received wisdom right you are You are interviewing some unconventional people, not just the standard bearers. You're also interviewing them. Your survey of super string theory, I'm sure was a lot of hard work and it means you understand a lot of physics. And that's valuable too, because some young person may look at that and say, oh, this is superstring theory. Do I want to take the trouble to learn this and work in this area? Is this what excites me? It excites my imagination. Do I want to spend my life on this?

Starting point is 00:42:56 And by giving them an overview of the whole field, which nobody does in an understandable way you're helping young people to decide what am i gonna do with my life you've got to make this decision in my opinion. You it helps to make the decisions what am i gonna do with my life in high school actually. That's about the after that you start going you know. because that's about the after that you start going, you know, on the rails in different directions already, you have much less freedom. High school, Stephen and Wolfram and I were saying to each other is maybe the last time that people still have open minds and maybe it can be influenced. So, so I'm sure a lot of the people that look at your stuff are not established

Starting point is 00:43:44 scientists. They know what they want to do. They know their area. They're not going to waste the time. So I suspect that the people that are looking at your podcast are younger people, outsiders who some of them are outsiders, but you have to be pretty interested to go through your thing on Super Strength. You have to have a pretty great curiosity for physics. So I suspect that a lot of the people who are looking at your

Starting point is 00:44:09 stuff are young people who are trying to decide what to do with their lives. What is the area that they feel they can contribute to that they believe has some beauty or some that they resonate with for some reason, depending on their personality. You know, people are born with personalities. My two children, each one of them is very different from the other. You know, so I was doing crazy research as a child already. And as a teenager, I was already coming up with definitions of randomness and stuff and complexity. So, each person has different talents.

Starting point is 00:44:45 And, you know, as somebody said, you can't know if you like pea soup, if you've never tried pea soup. So you're giving people a chance to see different things out there and maybe decide what to do with their lives. So I think that's a valuable contribution. And so I would say keep it up

Starting point is 00:45:03 if you can survive financially like this. So I think what you're doing is splendid and it's going to help some people to decide what they want to do with their lives, which is a very important decision and you've got to make it as young as possible. So I would say congratulations and keep up the good work, Gert, is what I would say. Professor, thank you for inviting me to the Institute for Advanced Studies. That was an honor and it was great to see you in person and to meet Rafael and a slew of other wonderful people.

Starting point is 00:45:41 Thanks very much, Gert. Take care. Also thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like. That's just part of the terms of service.

Starting point is 00:46:05 Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows

Starting point is 00:46:42 YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything, where people explicate Toes, they disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own Toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the

Starting point is 00:47:16 comments that hey, T.O.E. listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. And finally, if you'd like to support more conversations like this, more content like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash KurtJayMungle and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal, there's also crypto, there's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You also get early access to ad-free episodes, whether it's audio or video It's audio in the case of Patreon, video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough.

Starting point is 00:48:05 Thank you so much.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Slow Death of Scientific Innovation | Gregory Chaitin

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.