Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDoes Stephen Wolfram's Theory of Everything Work?
How does Stephen Wolfram's Physics Project work and what have we learned?
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Hey, Daniel, how can you tell the difference between a physicist and a crack pot?
Is this one of those Internet memes like can you tell which picture is a homeless man and which one is a physics professor?
Well, you usually can, but I guess. I mean, you know, if someone has a crazy new idea, how do you know whether to take them seriously or just ignore them?
Well, the truth is mostly you can't tell. I mean, some crazy ideas about the universe turn out to be true, like look at quantum mechanics.
Wow. So does that mean that you read every theory that people send you over the internet.
I try to, but you know, there are just too many. There's so many people out there with fun and silly and crazy ideas. So Honestly, most people in physics just ignore them.
Oh man, does that mean that the theory of everything could be right now buried in a spam folder.
What a tragedy selected for the junk mail pile by some ai.
I am Poor hammy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I'm always on the hunt for the theory of everything, but I don't expect it to show up in my inbox.
Is that how you usually get your research? The is through emails?
Pam, that's right. I just like looking there the slush pile, So like, maybe somebody emailed me exactly the idea I need right now.
Oh man, it's called tenure sit around and wait for emails for it.
No, but I do get messages some from our listeners suggesting new ideas and even like grand theories that could describe some of the open puzzles in physics.
Oh wow, that's awesome. It's awesome that people are listening and getting you know, stimulated intellectually, and they come up with their own ideas about how the universe might work.
Yeah, and it's not just our listeners, and it's not just me. I think basically everybody who's a physicist gets a few random suggestions for theories of everything in their inbox every week.
Do you think maybe that's sort of a basic human curiosity. You know, we're all trying to figure out how it all work.
We all are, and as we say on this podcast all the time, wondering belongs to everybody, and these questions about the universe are ones that everybody wants to know the answer to. And frankly, I love that people are thinking about this and that they're imagining that maybe they could come up with the idea they could have that moment of insight which explains deep questions about the universe.
Well, speaking of everybody, Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we examine all those big questions about the universe and take you to the forefront of what science knows and what it doesn't know, and what it's hoping you will email it to.
It because you know, I guess it turns out that science doesn't know everything. There's a lot we don't know.
We know a tiny amount. We've only recently learned how little we know about the universe, and so while it might feel like a lot of the stuff around you is understood, the fraction of the universe that we know is very small and big, crazy new ideas await.
Yeah, so it's sort of like the universe is still up for grabs. You know, anyone out there could potentially come up with the theory of everything, because we are pretty far away from it right now.
We are very far away from it. In fact, if you delivered it to me today in complete form, I probably wouldn't understand. It would take like days, weeks, months to digest it. It might require whole new branches of mathematics, which I'm totally not familiar with and nobody has even thought of. So even if aliens arrived and emailed me, or you know, delivered in golden engravings the theory of everything, it would take a while to understand it. I might immediately dismiss it.
You mean, are you saying my handwriting is that bad?
Are you an alien? Are you admitting that? Finally?
I am a doctor technically, so I think we're required to have bad handwriting, cryptic handwriting.
But the point is that the truth about the universe might be something which is strange and weird and sounds wrong on the surface, which makes us think about the universe in a different way. And that's the difficulty, but that's also the beauty of science, is that we follow the data, we follow the clues, and eventually we get to the right answer. It's amazing that the process works.
Yeah, and so today on the program, we'll be tackling something a new theory, a new clue about the universe that just that it is super recent, is hot off the presses it out and physicists are still sort of scratching their heads and trying to think about whether or not this is something that's actually true and described the universe, or maybe it's something that's totally wrong.
That's right. It sort of came out of left field, and it's a bold claim from a man famous for bold claims, and you know, dropped like a nine hundred pages of stuff on the physics community, and it's fascinating that people are taking it seriously. He's not a physics professor, but he's attracted the attention of a lot of top physicist.
Since to be on the program, we'll be asking the question, did Stephen Wolfram come up with a theory of everything.
Well, he definitely came up with a theory. The question is what's a theory of Does it describe our universe or any universe, or does it even work at all? And some listeners actually wrote in asking us to break this down for them.
Hey, Daniel and Jorge, this is Cure from Chicago, and I recently read about Stephen wolf From's physics project where he's trying to come up with a fundamental theory of physics that I know a lot of people have been searching for for a long time, and it sounded really interesting to me, but it was also a little bit over my head. And you guys are really great at explaining these kinds of things, so I was wondering if you could maybe tell me a little bit about how his theory works, how it's different from other theories that are out there, and if you feel like it actually has the potential to truly answer one of the great mysteries of physics. Thank you, guys, and keep up a great job.
Thanks to everybody who wrote in with those questions.
Well, let's talk about Stephen Wolfrim because you know, I know the name from my college days when I used a program called Mathematica. But tell me, what do you know about this person, Stephen Wolform.
Yeah, so Wilfrim is sort of a polymath. He's a really smart guy. He graduated got his PhD at a really young age. He studied particle physics. He worked with Richard Feynman.
Oh really, he's a physicist.
He's a physicist for sure. Yeah. Oh he was a professor at cal Tech.
Oh he was a professor.
He was a professor.
Yeah.
Oh, I see you made it to own like maybe like he wasn't a.
Profession No, no, I mean the guy was really smart. He definitely has the chops. He's the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award. He got it at age twenty one, so it was pretty clear from a young age that this guy had a brain on him.
And he's known for writing Mathematica, which is a software that engineers and mathematicians used to simulate things right and crunch equations and numbers.
Yeah, Mathematica is a beautiful piece of software. It does a lot of the really gorgeous physics animations that you probably see on Twitter and elsewhere, but it's also really good for doing symbolic mathematics. Like, there's lots of ways to get computers to do numerical calculations add these two numbers, but it's much harder to tell a computer like take this equation and simplify it. And Mathematica is really powerful at doing that kind of stuff, and so it's really the premier way to do math on the computer.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing d because it can do symbolic math, which is not just number crunching, but like manipulating you know, the concepts and symbols and functions.
That's right. And though he's gone off into founding a company and becoming super rich and writing this software, he's always had an interest in theory and in physics because this is where he started.
That's where it is his hard way.
Yeah, that's where all of our hearts are.
Right, That's not where his money was pocket book was. But so he always had a sort of a passion for Anna and the chops and the background for it to think about particle physics and things like the theory of everything.
Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of famous people who started out in physics and ended up, you know, becoming super rich or started out with like deep mathematics and went to Wall Street and became hedge fund gazillionaires. You know, so these people do penetrate sort of the wider culture. They don't know. We just stay in the white halls of academia. But you know, they're always wondering. I think, you know, could I crack that problem? Or you know, could I still contribute?
And I guess maybe you're saying he's unusual because he sort of came up with this new theory of everything, not from an office in a university. I guess that's what's kind of unusual or at research center. It's like he sort of did it on his own, in his house.
Yeah, he did it on his own, I mean, in his company with a couple other folks. But he's not part of a mainstream research.
Group, right, Like I see, he has a team.
He's a small team. He attracted some young students, one at Cambridge and other places to work with him.
Honest, this is getting more legit by the second day. I have to say, I feel like we started the episode talking about like a crack butt, but I'm like, oh man, I don't see the difference between this guy and Daniel.
Well, he's a lot richer.
He's rich.
That's difference number one. But no, this is not like you know, sheets of paper you found under the homeless guy at the bus station. Right. This is a guy who everybody respects as intelligent. But that doesn't mean necessarily that he's always on the forefront of knowledge. I mean, the guy's busy doing a lot of other things. It's difficult to stay on the forefront of knowledge and to keep up with academia and to understand the current ideas, and if you're not part of the community of academia, it's difficult to contribute. You know, some people think of science as like a single minded pursuit of truth. That's true, but it's also it's people, which means it's people having a conversation, and.
It's cocktail parties, it's hanging out on Twitter.
Yeah yeah, but it's also it's a big conversation and people are talking about stuff. And if you're talking about things nobody else is interested in or talking about, then even if you're right, it's going to be hard to attract their attentioncy So you have to speak the language and you have to know how to talk to people in order to get scientists to pay attention so you can be totally right and understand the universe. But if nobody will hear you or talk to you or understand what you're saying, you can't really have any impact. So there's this human side of science that I think is underappreciated.
It strikes me as not a good thing, though, you know, you know what I mean. Like, I feel like it strikes me as like, you know, people at a cocktail party not wanting to listen to somebody else just because they're not in their little group.
Yeah, it would be better if we had more people, so we had more diverse ideas, we had more funding for science, and if it was more accessible and more open. Absolutely, it'd also be better if humans were like objective and in ways to measure these things, you know, objectively, But we can't. Right, Human science is done by humans for humans. Oh, at least until the aliens come.
He had to press the alien button then, right, right, Well, maybe Stephen Wolform is an alien. That seems very likely. This guy seems too good to be true.
Oh my gosh, maybe this is the aliens coming to give us the ideas. Right, you're saying Stephen wolfrom his beans down.
Right.
He just went from crackpot to respectable physicists, to alien to maybe the next the second Coming. Where will this end up? Danny?
But this is unusual. It's very weird to have somebody outside of academia, even somebody who used to be a professor, come back and try to contribute. Often these ideas are not given any attention, So it's unusual to happen, and it's unusual that it has gotten so much attention.
Interesting, So okay, So he's sort of been working on this, apparently with the team for a while, and he came up with a theory of everything, and he sort of popped into the cocktail areadyophysicists and dropped the huge pile of paper saying I got it.
Yeah. And there was a little bit of a hint that this move was going to happen, because about twenty years ago almost he wrote a mammoth tome called A New Kind of Science, in which he unveiled the way he thinks about science. And you can tell from even just the title of the book A New Kind of Science, that he thinks very highly of himself and his own work and its.
Importance how would you have called it, Daniel, a possible new kind of science, a suggestion for a new kind of science.
Well, you know, I am a strong believer in humility. I value that a lot, and I think that's sort of the conclusion you'd leave for other people to draw. You know that you've invented a new kind of science. And a lot of the criticisms of that book is that there's a lot in there. It's like twelve hundred pages, but a lot of it is not actually that new. He's not always either familiar with the existing work in the field and sort of reproduced it and claimed it as his own. And some of the stuff is actually wrong. So there's a danger to working all on your own in your own ivory tower and then delivering a twelve hundred page tome is that you know, you can make mistakes early on, and you could have benefited from some notes notes.
Yeah, and so it made sort of a splash last week. And so physicists you were telling me, are still sort of going over his theory. But there's been sort of a big initial reaction. People on the internet have reacted to this.
Yeah, and so he's sort of a famous guy and people give him attention, and so he captured the world's attention, especially the attention of physicists, when he announced back on April thirteenth that he had a model for everything in the universe space, matter and.
Whatever and whatever, wow and whatever. That's his technical term.
And he put out a really long blog post and a video and then submitted a couple of sort of academic style papers to journals for review. But in the meantime, physicists have been trying to digest it. And you know, I'm part of this community, and everybody's been talking about it. Have you read it? What do you think? And there's sort of a you know, there's strong reactions to it.
Yeah, so you collected a couple of reactions from Twitter about physicists or well known physicists who have sort of commented on this potential discovery.
Yeah. And so, for example, Sabine Haustenfelder, she's a physics theorist and she's also famous for being sort of an alt theory consultant. She's the one that runs that program where you can email her your theory and you'll get like half an hour with an actual particle physicist to give you opinions. On it.
Did Wolfram consult with there I don't.
Think so, because she says I looked at it and I don't think it's interesting.
Wow, I spent five minutes with it.
I think she dug into it. And then there are other folks like Sean Carroll. He's a famous science popularizer and you know he's also a theorist working at the forefront of knowledge.
Yeah, so you have here that Sean said, I'm in favor of taking swings at fundamental physics with wildly non standard ideas and seeing what happens. Most such efforts will inevitably fail, but the payoff is huge if you hit the target. Yeah, all right, Well, it sounds like people are not embracing this right away, but keeping an open mind.
Yeah, I think people are sort of hopeful, like, wow, that would be awesome if you came up with a grand new theory. At first glance, it doesn't seem like maybe it really accomplishes everything that Stephen Wolfram claims, Like his claims are really broad and very grand, and I'm not sure he really delivers. But it's going to take the community a little bit of time to read these papers carefully and to digest them properly.
All right, Well, let's get into what this idea that Stephen Wolfram just dropped on the physics community, and let's talk about how that describes the universe. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel Stephen Wolfram, famous millionaire philanthropist, mathematica code writing genius, just drop on the fitnest community a theory of everything. And so let's first talk about what this theory is because I'm super curious, and then we'll talk about whether it actually describes the universe we live in. So what's the basic idea? Daniel here?
So the basic idea is one that I like. It says, let's look at this really complex, vast universe with all these different kinds of things in it at different scales, you know, from little particles up to galaxy superclusters, and let's try to explain all that using a simple set of rules. You know. That's the sort of basic principle behind particle physics. Right. You could just describe the universe as like it is, this is what it is, but we're seeking a reductionist answer. We want to pull it apart and explain everything in terms of something underneath that drives it. Right, And you know, we've had success with stuff like that, Like you look at the periodic table and you discover that all the patterns in the periodic table come out of very simple rules for how electrons fill their orbitals. So complex emergent phenomena can come from a simple set of rules. That's the motivation, right, right.
I mean, isn't that sort of how we've built all of our science theories. I mean it's all based on like simple particle interactions that then you know, accumulate, and then that's how the universe exists.
That's right. And Stephen Wolfrom likes a particular kind of this theory. They're called cellular automata. And the idea is just take a couple of basic objects and a couple of basic rules for how they can interact, and from that you can get really complex behavior. Yeah. Like, there's a guy who recently passed away named John Conway who devises this thing called the Game of Life, who show that you can devise a really simple game based on just like black and white squares and a few simple rules, and really complex patterns emerge, patterns that look a little bit like how life looks.
Okay, so I'm guessing that cellular automats at this concept is not related to cells like human cells, like biological cells. It's more like a mathematical term.
Yeah, it's like a little basic object. And you can also think of them as like nodes and so, you know, like a little dot. And the idea is just like, have a little very simple thing and write down simple rules for what it can do, and then study the behavior as you go to a zillion of these things, or you take them a zillion steps forward, and you discover that you can get from very simple things emerge complex behaviors. That's what the game is Life is all about.
Oh I see, so is the idea that he's sort of approaching it from the bottom up instead of the top down, you know, like you know, physicists, like what you do is you take regular big stuff and you break it apart and you sort of see what it's made out of. Is he saying that maybe a better way to approach the theory of everything is to start like, let's let's, uh, let's see if we can guess what the smallest thing does, and then let's build it up to see if.
It works absolutely. And in that sense, it's very similar in motivation to string theory. String theory says, maybe the whole universe is a bunch of title vibrating strings, and here are the rules for how those strings interact. Can we then build up the universe that we know and the physics that we've discovered from those simple rules. Very similar motivation, very similar approach.
But it's not the same as string theory.
It's not.
No, okay, So how is it different? How does that? How does this theory describe the universe? Like, what's what's he actually doing here?
So what he's actually doing is he says, let's begin with a couple of nodes. So he makes his graph where he says, I have a couple of nodes and I connect them with lines.
Of what of space, of matter, of energy?
Just mathematically pure right, so far we're just mathematically peer. Just like draw a dot in your mind and another dot and put a line next to them.
Man, start start with like total abstraction.
Just in the beginning of what is a dot? In the beginning, there was nothing. And Stephen Wilfrom created a dot, he said.
And he just went from alien to God, let there be created from the second Coming to the actual Father himself.
Well, he's sort of imagined. That's the point, you know, not to be God, but to imagine from what is the universe originated? What is the basic element of it? You know, if you wanted to build the universe, what is the essential source code? And he would like if the essential source code of the universe was just two or three lines that you just run a zillion times.
So he's saying, let's build up the universe from scratch, and let's start with this a little bit of math and code. Yeah, and see what happens, and see if it ends up, if you pile it on, if it ends up into you know, funny and interesting podcast about exactly.
And he's hoping that if you start from very simple rules and you build up a structure, then you could then recognize in that structure familiar rules of physics the things in our universe, because that would tell you that maybe those are then the simple rules of our universe. So he starts with, you know, a couple of dots and a line, and he says, all right, just pick a random graph, it doesn't really matter. Make four dots and draw some lines between them. He just know how it begins, and then make up some rules like say, well, if two things are connected to the same thing, then you know, you can add a line between them, or you can add a new node, or you can add a thing whatever. Just make up some simple rules rule.
It's kind of like a simple game like go or Othello or checkers.
Yes, exactly. You need a basic starting point and then you need an update rule that says how you can change the graph, how you can grow it. And so that's the whole idea is, you know, maybe the universe starts from a structure like that, And then he takes it and what he did with his team was make up some of these simple graphs and develop them, you know, a million times, a billion times with his very powerful mathematical lane, which and visualize them. And then he looked at them and he asked, do I recognize in here things from physics?
I see? So he started, He took a whiteboard with his team there in his compound and drew four dots, drew lines between them, and then did he did he guess what these rules might be or did he have, you know, a powerful computer, say all right, try to come up with a Brazilian rules and see if any of them come up to the universe.
Yeah, he just guessed a few rules. And the kicker is he didn't find a rule at works. Like. He has a few examples, and in those examples he shows, oh, there's some things in here that look like physics, and that's what motivates him to think, Oh, maybe I'm on the right track and we can dig into it a little bit more. But he hasn't actually found a rule that describes our universe.
Oh I see.
He's more like saying, maybe this approach will work.
Oh I see. Huh, So he hasn't He doesn't actually have a theory yet of the universe. He just has what he thinks might be a way to get to the theory of everything.
Yeah, it's sort of like a recipe for a theory, and theory is also a recipe for building a universe, So sort of a recipe for a theory for a recipe for the universe.
So now he's a cook as well. He's a chef in addition to being god.
He's cooking up universes.
Man is see has a recipe for a theory that might result in the universe.
That's right, And you know it's more than just like, hey, maybe this will work. He sees some cool stuff in these things that he builds up. You know, for example, you take these graphs and you have a few rules and you let them run and they build up interesting things, Like some of them build up what look like three D space, you know, like a mesh, a mesh, you know, a nicely organized mesh that you could say, hey, maybe space is quantized. And we've talked about how maybe space is just an emergent phenomena and it's you know a bunch of dots connected together.
Yeah, if we have an episode about quantum pham.
Yeah, quantum foam, and you know, the pixelated universe, and so that's sort of the leap to physics. He's saying, I'm coming up with this mathematical concert and then without building it in, without saying please build space, just letting it run. He sees that it that from it emerge things he recognizes, like a structure you could identify with space.
How can you, boy, how can you get three dimensions three dimensional space out of some dots? I guess that's my question.
Yeah, And actually his space is not three dimensions, which is one of the problems. He makes a space which is two point seven dimensions, which is pretty weird.
Actually that's pretty cool if you think about it. Fractional dimensions.
Fractional dimensions are cool, but I mean a little inconvenient, Like, where are you going to put your stuff? You know, you have three D stuff, It doesn't fit in two point seven D space?
Well that do you Jesus describe my closet and everybody's closet. I feel like my closet is made out of two points.
I know. I'm like, if you're going to do fractional dimensions two three and a half, at least you know, give us some extra don't just you know, lose point three dimensions. These days, everybody needs more rooms, some.
Of us need a little extra space. You know, that would have.
Been nice, that'd be a good selling point for the theory.
So he he runs this idea and he you know, grows it, sort of lets it grow itself, right, that's kind of the idea. And you're saying, he's he gets some things that maybe look like what might be space and also other things, right.
Yeah, So he identifies, you know, this mesh with a higher dimensionality space, and I encourage you to look up his blog posts. There's some really nice visualizations there, and you can understand how he goes from like a mesh of points to imagining the dimensionality of that points. Essentially, he's thinking about like the density of points as you move away from a central point, Like in three dimensions, the density of points, you know, drops in a certain way, and two dimensions, the density points drops in another way. So just by measuring like how many points there are as you take five or six steps away, then you can sort of measure the dimensionality of the space. But it's a leap, you know, Like this is a mathematical construct. It has some relationship to some things we see in the universe. Does that mean is how the universe works? Like that's a kind of a deep philosophical question, right.
I guess my question maybe at this point is how does it differ from some of the other theories that we've talked about, like quantum foam And is he coming at it totally from the left field or is he sort of saying, maybe these ideas have some validity to them, but I have my own spin on it.
Yeah, And that's one of the problems with his work is that he doesn't really put it into the context of existing ideas. And as you say, people have been thinking about quantized space as a building block of the universe and trying to go from there to recovering Einstein's equations, for example, and that's tricky people who've been working on for ten twenty years and they haven't quite gotten there yet. Whereas he's starting from a slightly different point. He's not saying, let's start from building blocks of space. He's like, let's just start from these nodes from which we get space and then from which we also get time and general relativity and quantum mechanics on all this stuff. He's going a level deeper He just blew my mind to have gone even further than everybody else has gone. You know, he's starting deeper and he's claiming to have gone further. So you understand why there's a little bit of skepticism that he could have accomplished all this by himself with a couple other people while also running a big company.
Right, well, if he's an alien chef second coming, it's totally possible. But yeah, he just made me realize. It's like he's trying to go from thoughts and a whiteboard to time itself and pays.
Itself to time itself. Yeah, and a lot of this stuff is interpretation. Right. You look at this structure in the graph that comes out and you say, oh, that looks to me like time. All right, it looks to you like time, But maybe you were looking for time, you know. Would you have deduced this just from looking at it? Would you have found Einstein's equations on your own without Einstein? Or you just sort of like looking at a room full of typing monkeys and saying, hey, look, this one's typing Shakespeare. Therefore, typing monkeys is the way to write great literature.
Right, Well, that strikes me as a little bit of what you guys do in a way, right, like theories, just like you know, not to equate physicists theories with monkeys, but you know, you guys start throwing out theories and then the experimentallys have to see which ones work.
Yeah, experimentalists have to see which ones work. That's the critical test here. You know, there's a lot of these different spaces and the fact that some of them can reproduce theories we already have and that have been tested doesn't necessarily mean that this is the fundamental structure of the universe. Right, There's lots of ways to reproduce physics theories. I could just have monkeys type and occasionally they would reproduce physics theories. Doesn't mean that the universe is a bunch.
Of monkeys, Remember, Daniel, keep an open mind.
Maybe it is.
Yeah, yeah, maybe it's a monkey.
Maybe it is.
Right, we meet the monkeys.
It's monkeys all the way down.
All right, let's get into whether people think this theory actually works or whether it's so out there that nobody is taking it seriously. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Hey, I'm Bruce Bosi on my podcast Table for two. We have unforgettable lunch after unforgettable lunch with the best guest you could possibly ask for, people like David Duchovny.
You know in New York's have a reputation is being very tough, but it's not. It's not that way at all. They're very accepting.
Jeff Goldbloom, Are you saying secret fries, secret fries, that's what you're saying. Yeah.
And Kristen Wigg I just.
Became so aware that I'm such a loud cheer.
My husband's just like sometimes I'll be eating and he'll just be looking at me. I'm like, I'm just eating, like I don't know how else to two. Table for two is a bit different from other interview shows.
We sit down at a great restaurant for a meal and the stories start flowing. Our second season is Aaron right now, so you can catch up on our conversations that are intimate, surprising, and often hilarious. Listen to Table for two with Bruce Bozi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, everyone, this is Jimmy O'Brien from john Boy Media. I want to quickly tell you about my podcast. It's called Jimmy's Three Things. Episodes come out every Tuesday and for about thirty minutes, I dive into three topics in Major League Baseball that I am interested in breaking stories, trends, stats, weird stuff. Sometimes I make up my own stats. Sometimes I do a lot of research and it ends up I was wrong the whole time. So that's something you can get in on. Use Jimmy's Three Things podcast to stay up to date on Major League Baseball and to make you just a smidch smarter than your friend who's a baseball fan. You listen to me and then you go tell him, hey, I know this and you don't. So I make you smarter than your friends. That's what Jimmy's Three Things is all about. Listen to Jimmy's Three Things on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You could also find it on the Talking Baseball YouTube channel, and new episodes drop every Tuesday.
All right, Daniel, talk to me about two point seven dimensional space. That is still blowing my mind. How can you have two like fractional dimensions? Is it that like one of them is not quite a dimension.
Well, he doesn't really have any spatial dimensions at all, right, it's just points and lines. He just connects the points with lines, and he tries to make an analogy to dimensions. He says, if you take a point and I walk four points away, right, I walk four points away in every direction, then I can count sort of how many points are in that object. You can take paths away from that point in every direction. You can ask how many points are within four steps away, and how many points are within ten steps away and fifteen steps away, And that grows differently if you're in three dimensional space or two dimensional space or four dimensional space. So he's taking that as a measure of dimension. Right, it doesn't have many dimensions built in. You could take his whole hypergraphs and just lay them flat on a piece of paper, or you could spread them out out in three D. It's totally arbitrary. There's no place to hang these things, right. They don't have locations, They just have relationships. But he's contending that from these relationships there is a structure, and that structure is very similar to dimensionality.
To the relationship that things have in actual space.
Physically, yes, yes, exactly. So you know, volume grows with are cubed for a sphere, area grows like are squared for a circle. Right in four dimensions, things grow with a different dependence. And so he just asks, as I take steps away from a single point, what's the density of points? And that's my measure of the dimensionality of my space. And he doesn't get a number of two or three. He gets this weird two point seven, and so you're like, what what does that even mean?
If you roup you get three, so that you know that's not you know, fluch.
Factory physics is like hand grenades and horseshoes as long as you get close.
Well, you make an interesting point, which is that you know, if just because something does something the way that you see it doesn't mean that it's how things are kind of like, you know, just because you can build an artificial intelligence, for example, or like a function that spits out or happens to simulate how a ball gets tossed up in the air, doesn't mean that that's how the universe works, that the balls float through the air. According to an AI.
Yeah, and I think there's two different issues here. One is exactly what you just said, you know, you can't just identify similar behavior and say that's the truth. But that's actually a really hard philosophical problem. Like, if you have a theory of strings that completely describes the universe, does that mean that strings are real? I mean, and somebody asked us this question over Twitter just yesterday. They said, what if I had an alternative theory of bananas and it also described the universe and you could never tell the difference between strings and bananas, would that mean that bananas are also a valid theory of the universe? And which would be true? Oh?
I see, if you have two theories that both describe the universe, how do you tell which one's true or the right one?
Yeah, And if you can't tell the difference, if they're like both make exactly the same predictions, but they have very different descriptions of what's really happening, then which one is what's really happening? Well, the answer is, we can't tell. And so it depends on what you think true means. You know, is there some untestable, actual truth in the external universe or is it really just about describing what we see? So that's sort of a deep unanswerable philosophy question. But there's a there's a more practical angle to it, which is, can you do more than just describe what we already see? Can you predict something we haven't yet seen? Right, It's very easy to look in a sea of garbage and pick out something sparkling, like, look, I produced one diamond, or something.
Like my theory, my simulation, my code predicts how this ball will what this ball will do if I toss it up in the air. But that's sort of not interesting to physicis yeah, like.
We have all these everything that he's derived we already have. We have Einstein's equations, we have special relativity, we have quantum mechanics. Right, the question is has he revealed any new insights that he made any predictions. If his theory is really true, it should predict something. It should say in the universe also works in this other way that you hadn't yet realized, and then we can go out and verify that and be like, oh, well, then maybe your theory is true. Right. It's not just enough to say to describe the universe, because my hundred typing monkeys will eventually do that also, but they will generate nonsense predictions. They don't tell me anything about the universe. I don't already know.
You just have to give those monkeys more bananas. I mean that that would make it all work. But it sort of sounds like maybe what he's doing that's new and interesting is he's actually sort of making that connection between a really simple set of things to the complex things. You know, Like, you know, string theory has been around for a long time, but nobody has tried to build up the universe using strings, have they. It's like maybe he's sort of done that and is seeing things that are promising.
Well, that's one problem with string theory is that you can take strings and build up universes, but you get like ten to the five hundred different kinds of universes, and ours is one of them, but it doesn't necessarily predict ours. Right, So then you ask, well, if the universe is just strings, how can we end up in this universe? And he is basically the same problem, right. He has a potent a lot of potential possible rules for building up the universe using his hypergrafts. Some of them lead to universes sort of like ours, though you know, wrong number of dimensions et cetera. But some of them don't, and so you know, we're sort of in this vast sea of outcomes. It would be much more compelling if he had a basic set of rules that necessarily led to our universe that there was nothing else that could predict, like it had to only be this way. That would be much more compelling.
That would be better maybe, but maybe not even true or possible, Like maybe the universe is just this random set of rules.
Oh man, that what do we even doing? Right? If the universe is not understandable. But I know, I hope it is.
I get it.
I don't give up. I don't give up. I'm still hoping. And so it's totally valid to look for a new way to build things up from scratch. And maybe he's right, and it would be deep insights if he was. But you know, it hasn't really shown any new insights yet, hasn't really shown us anything new that can come from it. And there's also a lot of questions about the sort of the connections he's made between what his theory can do and what we've already discovered.
I see, well, maybe it stepped me through some examples of what you mean here because you know, you were telling me earlier that in some ways his model, his theory of the universe sort of predicts causality and things like special relativity and particles. Is that not sort of interesting or.
It's interesting and it's a good idea, but it's not clear that it predicts it, or if he's just sort of like identifying something in his structure which looks a little bit like it and it's sort of wishful connections. Right, there's a lot of leaps here where he's like, oh, look at this sort of structure dot here's Einstein's equation, And you're like, well, hold on a second. You know, I can write down Einstein's equation on a chalkboard. Doesn't mean that it's a necessary consequence of what I've just done. But there are some cool connections, for example, causality. He takes his little hypergraphs and his little rules for updating them, and his picture those rules for updating them. That's time. Every time you change your hypergraph by following these rules, that's like a step forward in time. And he shows that for some simple examples, it doesn't really matter which order you apply these rules in, Like maybe you apply them first to this node and then to that node, and the other time you do it another direction. Sometimes you end up in the same place no matter what. Start from the same initial conditions, do things in a different order, end up in the same place. And so for him, that's causality that says, look, this first place has to come before this other place, because in these graphs you always start with one and end up at the other. So that's where causality comes from.
He sees behavior in this graph, you know, he sees shades of what might if maybe you look into it, or if you sort of maybe keep going with this, you might sort of rediscover or create causality and special relativity and particles.
Yeah, exactly the way. You know. I sometimes listen to my children's random thoughts and say like, oh, wow, look you you're a genius. You just had some great idea. You know, you can recognize in random babbling, you know, great ideas if you're hopeful, right, And so there's a little bit of that, like, well, yeah, you could have said that, but are you just imposing on very complex structures the things you wanted to see? So that's one example. Another is he tries to describe particles. And he says, Okay, in this case, if space is this mesh of points, right, then what is matter? How do you get matter in this measure points? And so what he does is he says, well, maybe matter, maybe particles are these special connections between these points, these you know, arrangements between these points. Like every time you have three nodes with these particular connections between them, you call that a particle. And he's tried to show that sometimes these particles are stable configurations, like if they exist, they will continue to exist, and they will move across the graph. So they're like patterns in these connections.
The relationship between nodes sort of moves in the way that maybe a particle would move through space.
Yeah, exactly, recognize the relationship and see that relationship sort of translate itself across the graph. That would be what a particle would be.
Wow, I'm getting the picture of, you know, having the matrix. At the end, Neo sees the code behind the universe. I wonder if this is how he was feeling. He's like, oh, I can see the whole universe. It's just a whole bunch of notes. Yeah, I am. Keanu reeves again, if it worked.
He hasn't actually made that work. He hasn't seen that happen on his graphs. He's just sort of like, hey, that would be cool. And he's mentioned that, you know, they're going to follow up on that in a couple of weeks and hope to figure that out. And I'm like, yeah, I'd like to figure out particle physics in a couple of weeks too.
Yeah, why didn't he just wait a couple of weeks before publishing this?
Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's like, Okay, well you have some cool ideas, you have some notions here, you haven't really quite figured it out, so why now?
Well, maybe a question is he's seen all these things time, causality, particles in his you know, mesh of nodes. So is this, you know, the mesh from one simple set of rules, or is he like tweaking the rules every time and like, oh, if I tweet this way, you get causality, If I tweak them this way, you get space.
He identifies all these things from one simple set of rules, but he's tried a few different rules, and he's tried this rule and that rule and the other rule, and he notices similar behaviors in a lot of these meshes, which is cool and makes it more compelling, I see. But again, he hasn't found the rule that he thinks is convincing, and so one thing he'd like is for everybody to participate. He has a website. You can go and build a graph and enter a rule and see what universe it builds. And he wants to sort of like crowdsource the theory of everything, crowdsourcing making universes exactly. We are all God.
That sounds like a smart god. He's like, God's like, I'm tired, I'm out of ideas. I'll just get one of my creations to help me create more creations.
Right, I'm just going to leave the recipe on the counter here, and I want you to actually make the cookies.
All right. Well, it sounds sort of like, you know, he's he's sort of a bit of an outsider, and he's sort of maybe taking a huge leap forward without bringing the rest of the community along. And there's some skepticism, but it sort of sounds like his idea is not too far off from what people are thinking or we're looking for. It sounds like maybe he's just sort of skipped a few steps, you know, in the procedures of physics.
Yeah, he skipped a few steps in the procedures, which is okay. I mean, if you deliver a five hundred page treatise on the universe, it's a lot to swallow. But hey, if it's true, thank you, right, thank you skipped a few steps in his treatise. Like you read it and you're like, well, well, how do you get from here to there exactly? You know, And in this case, he knows all the results in advance, and so he's sort of like dot dot dot general relativity. You know, you have to really show that it's the only consequence, and I don't think he's really compellingly done that. The way to do that, really compellingly would be to come up with a new theory, be like, okay, and here's dark matter or here's the dark energy, or this explains that, you know, what happened before the Big Bang or something, and then we could probe that and see that it's true, and wow, okay, maybe then the universe is just four lines of MATHEMATICA.
Well, it sounds like maybe he is not quite there yet, but he's saying, look, it's promising you can sort of see space, you can sort of see time totally, and sounds like maybe the real answer is to be determined. In a couple of weeks, will out, Daniel, everyone will be stuck at home, but will know how everything works.
Yeah, and he has made it a prediction or two. You know, he thinks that the size of these high graphs is something like ten to the minus ninety three meters.
That doesn't mean the size of the little bananas of MAKEUPI.
Yeah, the distance between these points in the node, right, the minimum distance, the basic unit of distance in his universe is ten to the minus ninety three meters, which is like almost impossibly small and hard to think about because remember, the smallest distance we've ever seen is like ten to the minus twenty meters, which is already like you know, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a proton. And other people think the universe like the quantum loop theory, people think the universe is like ten to the minus thirty five meters is like the size of a space pixel. So this guy's like sixty orders of magnitude smaller. And so that's a prediction that's almost impossible to test.
So is string theory kind of.
Yeah, so is strength theory. But strength theory, we think operates on the Plank scale. So it's only fifteen orders of magnitude away, you know, instead of being sixty or seventy orders of magnitude away.
Right, it might be difficult to prove this. Ever, you're saying.
Yes, yes, And you know, he imagines that there might be particles down at that little scale, and maybe those particles are even dark matter. Right, So I was saying earlier he should make predictions. All right, Well he has made this one, but it's sort of out of reach. This is not something we're going to test in a couple of weeks.
But at the same time, it could be that the real nature of the universe will never be able to grow.
Man, you're really hoping for that, aren't you. You're just like Daniel, You're wasting your life. No, it's true.
It's true that it's.
True that the universe might not be understandable to humanity. It's true the universe might not be understandable, but for some weird reasons. So far, we've been making pretty good progress, which suggests that this method of science and our way of thinking is somehow aligned with the way the universe works or can be aligned, and so yeah, we'd like to keep doing it.
We're all wishful thinkers.
Not everybody thinks that we're wasting our time.
All right, Well, well that's pretty interesting. I guess we'll find out in the future whether he's right or not. And in the meantime, I guess you can go online and read more about it and even make up your own universes.
That's right. And you know, he's done a bit of an unusual PR campaign with his blog post and his videos and his announcements, but he's.
A PR note for physics.
Yeah, but he's also submitted some papers to journals and so they're being vetted by other physicists taking them seriously, you know, peer review, and so that takes a little while, and so you know, stay tuned.
He learned his lesson from two thousand and two where he just dropped a book.
Well, no, he's also writing a nine hundred page book which we.
Have very soon, I see, But he learned to post it on Twitter.
Yeah, so stay tuned. You know, the top minds in the fields are thinking about this, and they will critique it and criticize it and find what's good and what remains to be worked on. But you're right, it could be the theory of everything. We just don't know yet and we might never know.
Or it might come from somebody and not him, but somebody who is maybe listening to this podcast.
That's right. So if you're working on your theory everything, take heart. You know, Stephen Wilfrim might not be right.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks so much for listening, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns and electric cars. Visit you asdairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life. Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible.
As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast.
Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen. With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end of spark meaningful conversations, it's a hit with both kids and parents. Listen to Kid's Bible Stoice podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,
