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Roger Penrose: Quantum Theory Is Wrong, Not Einstein — Transcript

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0:00It's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. Quantum theory as a whole is wrong. It's not Einstein
0:06was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. What do consciousness, the measurement problem, and black
0:14holes have in common? With characteristic boldness, Sir Roger Penrose outlines his
0:20controversial views on the collapse of the wave function. The Schrödinger equation, quantum
0:25theory as a whole is wrong. The role of gravity in quantum mechanics. The principle of equivalence,
0:31which is the basis of general relativity, is in conflict with the principle of superposition.
0:37And his own radical theory of cyclic cosmology. I don't believe in inflation. That is the idea that
0:44our universe evolved from a previous universe, and gives rise to another, forming an ever-repeating
0:51cycle. Penrose doesn't just poke holes in existing theories, he offers ambitious frameworks like
0:57twistor theory that could potentially unify quantum theory with general relativity. My
1:02name is Curt Jaimungal. This episode was filmed on location at the Math Institute at Oxford,
1:09directly after our interview at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. It's a rare in-person glimpse into
1:16one of the most influential mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century. Sir Roger Penrose,
1:24it's been a long time coming. I've been a huge fan for, I think, decades. Literally decades. Thank
1:31you. And welcome. My pleasure. Good meeting you at the Institute for Arts and Ideas. Lots of people
1:38don't believe some of them. The arts and ideas? What do you mean? Well, the ideas about cosmology,
1:44which I have, which are... Certainly, people have a lot of trouble believing them. Even though we
1:51have good evidence. Still, never mind. Is that the torch that you want passed on most? The
1:58conformal cyclic cosmology? Well, I have a trouble because there's more than one thing. You see, one
2:03of the things is twistor theory and its progeny. There's been a conference. You see, this is taken
2:10seriously in the sense that there has been a conference going on, all about twistor theory.
2:16Not just a conference, but a whole term, I think, dedicated to the subject of twistor theory, which
2:25is something which I sort of started in 1963, I think it was. And it's had many developments and
2:35many offspring, you might say. And it's spread out to have interest in different areas. Now, it's one
2:45of the things that I've been working on for most of my life. And I can't explain it without being
2:50a little technical. It's just that... You can feel free to be technical on this podcast. Okay.
3:00It's a bit like... Well, Hamilton discovered quaternions, which was a way of talking about
3:06the geometry of three-space. And he introduced this thing called the vector product, which
3:12if you have two vectors... Well, it's really an algebra of vectors. You have vectors and scalars
3:18mixed together. And if you multiply two vectors, you have this thing called a cross product, which
3:23gives you a third vector. Now, this kind of notion is coming in at a different level with what I call
3:33twistors, or now what I call bitwistors. See, the twistors... The subject took ages to develop. As I
3:41say, 1963, when I first had the concept, which... So I gave a talk in Cambridge just recently,
3:50where I explained the origin of the ideas. And there was a certain, you might call it, slight
3:57misconception. There are two different concepts which get confused in twistor theory. And these
4:02two concepts are positive and negative frequency, and positive and negative helicity. And the thing
4:09is that the positive-negative frequency idea was something that I learned from Engelbert Schuching,
4:16who was somebody I shared an office with when I was in a group of people working on general
4:24relativity in Syracuse, New York State, in the United States. And there were a lot of
4:33people working on relativity theory there. And this was, I think, in 1962. And I learned from
4:42Engelbert Schuching two things which I found very interesting. One of them was this question of what
4:50you mean by... What's important in quantum field theory? And he said the most important
4:55thing in quantum field theory is the splitting of field amplitudes into their positive and negative
5:01frequency parts. You keep the positive frequency and you throw away the negative frequency. And
5:07I thought, gosh, that's an interesting idea. The other thing he told me was... And he told
5:13me various things, but these were the things of relevance to what I'm saying. The other thing he
5:17said was to do with the Maxwell field equations. Maxwell's equations, which are very important,
5:24they describe electricity, magnetism, and light. So it's a theory of light, as well as how electric
5:32and magnetic fields interrelate to each other. Very beautiful equations, which I learned about
5:37when I was a graduate student. And I was very keen on the Maxwell equations, especially when
5:43you write them in this formalism called two-spinor formalism, which I can say a bit more about later.
5:50But the Maxwell equations, he told me they are conformally invariant. So they only depend on
5:56space-time structure independent of the scaling. So if you magnify the scale up or down, magnify
6:04the metric up or down, if you like, it makes no difference. That's conformally equivalent. So
6:09the conformal maps are ones, or the conformal transformations are ones which can change the
6:14scale, but they don't change the... Well, they don't change the light cones in special relativity
6:21terms. So the speed of light is the same. Of course, light, after all, speed of light is the
6:27same when you magnify and change the scale. But what struck me about this, these two facts that
6:35I learned from it, is there seemed to be a little of an impasse between the two. I mean, how do you
6:41decide what's splitting the positive and negative frequency? You look at the individual frequencies,
6:45which means you do a Fourier decomposition. And you take each individual Fourier component,
6:51and you split that into its positive and negative parts. That's not conformally invariant. You do a
6:56conformal map, conformally scaling, the Fourier decomposition does not go into itself. And so
7:04I thought it would be lovely to have a way of looking at this, which is, they come together,
7:09and you don't have this sort of impasse between the two. Well, I was aware, I don't know whether I
7:16was told or I thought about it myself, I was aware of the fact that if you take the field of complex
7:23numbers, fold them up into a sphere, so you've got a point at infinity as well, and you take the real
7:29numbers, and think of that as the equator. So the real numbers go around the equator,
7:34and the complex numbers go up and down. And if you have a function which is defined on the equator,
7:40which extends into one hemisphere, that's positive frequency, if it extends into the other
7:46hemisphere, it's negative frequency. This is a completely conformally invariant description. You
7:51conformally invariant the sphere, and it doesn't change the splitting into two halves. So I wanted
7:57a way of doing this, but globally for space-time. So for the whole space-time, I wanted it to be
8:05somehow that the real space-time is the boundary between two extensions into the complex. But if
8:11you just complexify space-time, make all your coordinates complex, you get an eight-dimensional
8:16space, not a five-dimensional space. That's no good. It doesn't split it into two halves at all.
8:22You get a thing called the forward tube, which is a little tiny thing at one side or the other,
8:27on which you can talk about things being regular there or not, but it doesn't split anything in
8:31half in the same sort of way. So it didn't satisfy me. I don't know why, I mean, what was I doing?
8:37It didn't seem to have any rational reason for looking at this. But it did seem to me there ought
8:42to be a way of exploiting this beautiful way in which you do the positive and negative frequency
8:48without having to look at the Fourier components individually. It's a deeper concept, if you like,
8:54and it's also conformally invariant. So the scale business that Maxwell theory has, you don't lose
8:59that. Okay, well, I had this sort of going around in my mind. I didn't know what to do about it. It
9:07was a very unfortunate occasion because I was in Texas, in Austin, Texas, and I was working with
9:15various colleagues in Austin, Texas. Engelbert Schucking was running this particular meeting.
9:20It was a year-long meeting where people like Roy Kerr, Ray Sachs were there too, and very
9:27distinguished people working in relativity theory. And there were also people in Dallas, Texas,
9:35and one of them in particular was somebody I was collaborating on a book. I don't think I was doing
9:40it at that time, on spinors, and this was Wolfgang Winder. And Ivor Robinson, he was somebody who
9:50was a very clever fellow, had wonderful ideas. He never wrote anything down. He relied on getting a
9:57co-author to write the paper. It was all done with words. He had a wonderful way with words.
10:04The Americans loved him because he spoke in this way that they weren't used to, which the words all
10:10fitted together in this beautiful way. Yes, he did have a wonderful way with words. There's no doubt
10:14about it. Was he the one that didn't write papers? Yes. Well, he was important in another story,
10:21which is a different story, my story, namely the singularity theorem, because that was walking
10:28down the street and crossing the road. That's a different story. It was the same person.
10:33That was Ivor Robinson. Yes. So he obviously was somebody who could take my attention. But what he
10:43had told me about was he'd found some solutions of Maxwell's equations, which had a very special
10:50character. They're what are called null. They have points in one direction. You see, usually you have
10:57these two directions, which are called principal null directions, on the light cone. They're
11:02light-light directions. And if they coincide, it's what's called null. And these are more
11:07like radiation fields. And he found a beautiful family of solutions, which he constructed in the
11:14following strange way. You take a light ray, one light ray, and you take all the light rays
11:19which meet it. When I say a light ray, I mean the trajectory of a photon. So in space-time,
11:25it's the space-time picture of a photon. It's thought of as a particle. So now if you think of
11:31one light ray, and you look at all the light rays which meet it coming in, then you have a family of
11:36light rays. And then he constructs this solution, which is based on those light rays. Now they have
11:42this awkward singularity, which is the light ray that they meet. Why is that a singularity? Well,
11:47they all start coming together, and so they're not... The nature of the solution is different
11:52when they come together, you see. Okay, but it's of a different sort of singularity than
11:55the singularity theorem. It's not a serious singularity. It's a singularity in the maximum.
11:59I think things become infinite. I see. I don't remember the details of it. Sure. They just become
12:04infinite on that solution. Just because the light rays don't make this nice family anymore. They got
12:08crunched up on the other light ray. But what Ivor Robinson did, he had this clever trick,
12:15where you just place the light ray into the complex, make it a complex light ray, then you
12:21can keep the light rays which meet it. There's a family which is still real. So you can see those
12:26real ones, even though the one they meet is in the complex. And they twist around each other
12:32in this wonderful configuration. I thought about this before, and I think I knew in detail what
12:39this configuration was. It corresponds to what's called Clifford parallels. Clifford parallels are
12:47a beautiful geometrical configuration. If you take a 3-sphere, so that's an ordinary sphere,
12:54but in 4 dimensions. So it's a 3-dimensional surface in 4 dimensions. So it's a family
13:03of points which have the same distance from the origin in 4 Euclidean dimensions. I'm not talking
13:08about space-time now. That 4 Euclidean dimensions. So you have a 3-sphere, and there's this beautiful
13:14family of circles which fill the whole 3-sphere. No two of them intersect, and they all link each
13:21other. It's called Clifford parallels, or it has a name which is the topological people like better.
13:31But it's called the fibration. Right. It's a sphere's worth of circles. It's a very nice
13:39example of a fiber bundle, and how you have this diagram that people like to draw where
13:45you have the fiber, which is the circle, and the bundle, the entire bundle is the sphere,
13:51and the projection down is a 2-sphere. So each circle corresponds to a point on a 2-dimension,
13:57an ordinary 2-sphere, an ordinary sphere. So the each point corresponds to a circle.
14:03So it's a beautiful example of a fiber bundle. It's the one most simple and beautiful example
14:09you can have in a way. I was well aware of it. I just liked the geometry. I thought it was really
14:13elegant. And it's the same kind of thing you get with these, except that now you're talking about
14:18light rays. So if you think of the light rays—not quite the easiest way to say this is—it's now the
14:27circles correspond to each point of the Clifford 3-sphere corresponds to a light ray, and the whole
14:37family of them twists around in this complicated way. So I was familiar with this configuration,
14:43and that this was a sort of way of thinking about a complex light ray. You push it into the complex,
14:49and you get this real description of it, which somehow feels out this complex light ray,
14:54but only in this real configuration that you can visualize. So I found this very beautiful. Now,
15:00is this any use to me? Well, the occasion that I'm talking about here was a particular occasion
15:08which was maybe in a sense the most significant thought which I had had, which was that there
15:18was an event, a very unfortunate event, when Kennedy was assassinated. And this was in 1963,
15:29and it was in Dallas. And my Dallas colleagues, including Wolfgang Rindler and Ivor Robinson and
15:36other people there, Schuchart, Pitch Oshvart was there. And they were at a dinner, and Kennedy was
15:46supposed to go and give a talk at this dinner. And he was awfully late, and they sort of joked,
15:51well, maybe somebody shot him. Somebody had shot him. And they came, and it was a way of… someone
16:01said they came. It was just about a week later, I think, when we decided to go to southern Texas,
16:09to go to a nice place where there was a beach, and people could relax and try and recover from
16:13this awful occasion. And do some math? So we went down there. I don't think we taught much
16:19math. I don't remember. But I remember coming back, and most of the people wanted to talk,
16:25gossip with each other, including my then-wife. They really wanted to gossip. I wasn't interested
16:31in the gossip. I just wanted some peace. And I was the one who was committed, more or less,
16:38committed to be in the car driven by Pitch Oshvart. Now, the thing about Pitch Oshvart,
16:44he was a Hungarian who did speak English, but he didn't like to speak, even in Hungarian,
16:48I think. He didn't like speaking. He was a silent person. Okay, so he was the Hungarian dirac. Yes,
16:56but he was definitely, he could speak English, but with a strong Hungarian accent, of course. And he
17:03was the driver of the car when I came. And so this was very nice for me, because I didn't have to
17:08make up conversation to speak to him. He preferred not to have conversation. So I think to myself, I
17:14knew about this Robinson Congruence of rays, which sort of describe a light ray, but which has been
17:20displaced in this way. And I said, the thing to do is to count, and I thought I didn't say anything,
17:26to count the number of degrees of freedom this configuration has. How much freedom does it
17:31have? And I counted them, and it has six degrees of freedom. And that's significant because? Yes,
17:38this is very significant, because light rays themselves have five degrees of freedom. So
17:44it's only one. You make your light ray complex in a sense, and you only drop your dimensionality
17:51by one. It's not really what you do if you're complex around light, where we have five complex
17:56dimensions. No, no, this only gives it, drops it by one. Why is that so important to me? Because
18:02this gives me a picture, the light rays themselves are represented by points on this bound three,
18:10sorry, this five-dimensional boundary. And the Robinson Congruence, as I call them, these
18:17twisting congruences of light rays, represent the points. If they go right-handed, they're one side,
18:23and if they go left-handed, they're the other side. This is the splitting of the space into two
18:27halves, just what I was looking for. Only it does it globally for the whole of space-time. Don't
18:33think of points, think of light rays. And then the complex ones, in this strange contorted sense,
18:40are only one more dimension. So that was the origin of twistor theory. I went back, got him
18:48back much earlier than anybody else, because they were still gossiping, I guess. And I went to the,
18:54I had a blackboard there, and I worked it out in terms of two component spinors. And
19:00it worked beautifully. And this was twistors. You take two two-component spinors, the way you can
19:07think of it, see a two-component spinor ordinarily points along the light cone. It has a null vector
19:15associated with it, and that null vector points along the light cone. In addition, there's a
19:20little flag plane, and the flag plane tells you its phase. So the length of a, not the length,
19:26but the sort of extent of the null vector gives you one scale, and the other scale is the phase,
19:36which is the little flag plane. So you have this nice geometrical way, apart from the sign, which
19:41you have to add in addition, you've got the nice way of describing two-component spinors. I was
19:46well familiar with that. So the thing about the twistors, as you can think of the light ray, where
19:52does it hit the light cone of the origin? Some point. Then you look at the light ray going up,
19:57it hits that point. That's a thing I called omega. I didn't call it omega at the time,
20:02but it's to do with angular momentum, really. It's the moment of the light ray about the origin,
20:07and the other is pi. That's the momentum of the photon. So you've got the momentum and the moment,
20:14and they're two two-component spinors. They give you a four-dimensional entity. This was a
20:19twistor. So that was the origin of twistor theory. I tried to talk about it to my colleagues there.
20:25None of them were interested. Engelbert was. He was the only one that was at all interested
20:30in what I'd done. So it was a little bit of a- Why weren't they interested? Because it wasn't
20:36general relativity. I didn't know how to do general relativity with twistors. It took me
20:43decades to find out how to do general relativity with twistors. Do you think twistors will be an
20:48ingredient in a theory of everything? So something that combines the standard model? They should have
20:53a much broader application. But you see, what you have to do is take another step,
21:00which I sort of made a couple of years ago. I made it in a slightly different way. Well,
21:05it was a couple of years ago, but in a slightly different way, about six years ago. I wrote an
21:13article then, which wasn't published until much later. But the article I wrote more recently
21:18was in honor of C. N. Yang, the great physicist, one of the people who got a Nobel Prize for weak
21:25interactions and their chirality. I mean, it's quite curious because of that, too. You see,
21:32you have the chirality. The twistor has a chirality to it automatically, which is
21:40the way it's described. If you reflect it, it really goes into something else. It goes into
21:49a dual twistor. So you have a twistor, which is a four-complex-dimensional space, vector space, if
21:55you like. The dual of that space is the opposite twist. So you have a twistor and a dual twistor,
22:03and they twist the opposite way, roughly speaking. But this was all to do with... I was trying to do
22:10positive and negative helicity. I learned not too long after this that you can describe momentum
22:16and angular momentum of twistors very nicely. And the null ones, if you're talking about light rays,
22:23this is just a twistor, basically. It's a twistor and a dual twistor together.
22:28But the nice thing, you can describe the angular momentum. This is the notation I use later to call
22:36the moment an angular momentum thing. That's the omega. And the momentum is the other one, which is
22:43the pi part. And that's just the splitting which gives you these 2 interpretations. They're the
22:502 parts. These have 2 2-component splinters. And they give you these 2 parts. It's also conformally
22:55invariant. The conformal transformations work beautifully. Conformal invariance. It got more
23:01mixed up with positive and negative helicity. You see, what you really see is that the twistor,
23:10the positive and negative... You have the space, which is split into 2 halves. The space,
23:16incidentally, is a well-known space to geometers. It's a complex projective 3-space. So it's a
23:226-real-dimensional space, which is really complex 3-dimensional space. So it's nice to visualize,
23:28because you just think of it as 3 dimensions. And you say, well, it's really complex too. So you can
23:33visualize lots of things in there. And it's really 6 real dimensions. And the 5 dimensions go either
23:41up or down, depending upon what is it that's positive or negative. Well, you look at... It took
23:47a lot of time to analyze this. But when you really see its connection with angular momentum and so
23:51on, it really is the helicity. So the photon is rotating right-handed, if that's right-handed
23:58or left-handed. So twistors are inherently chiral. They're inherently chiral. So this was where it
24:04was. I talked about helicity. That's what it was at that time. Whereas the intention was
24:10this should be positive-negative frequency. So the whole subject kind of got mired, in my view, with
24:18this confusion. And it got particularly so when one started to talk about general relativity. And
24:25there were some ideas which came from Ted Newman, who was a close colleague of mine. And he was
24:31interested in making spacetime a little complex and looking at angular momentum and things which
24:37come from your displacement into the complex. It was a very deep insight that he had there. And
24:43I realized that that was the sort of thing I was doing. And one of his ideas... I won't go into the
24:49details. I realized you could take this and talk about them in twistor terms. And this described a
24:56kind of twistor, a twistor which actually referred to a curved spacetime. Okay, wait. When you say
25:03you talked about them do you mean the complex spacetime in twistor terms? Yes. It is a complex
25:10spacetime. And, you see, Ted Newman didn't mind about his spacetime not being directly physical. I
25:17don't know whether he minded it or not. He called it H-space. He had a construction which involved
25:23making spacetime complex and looking at it in this particular particular way that he did. So why
25:30was that interesting to you? Because when we've talked off-air if I mention the word supersymmetry
25:37there's a grimace on your face. If I mention string theory because it has extra dimensions
25:42and maybe some other flavors there's an even worse grimace. I can tell you where the grimace
25:47comes from. See, all these things are adding extra dimensions to spacetime. Now what I was doing was
25:53absolutely crucially tied to the spacetime having three space and one time dimension. If you change
26:00that you wreck the theory. A theory that works in n dimensions especially mathematicians that's
26:06a feature that it can work in any dimension. And if you say my theory only works in four dimensions
26:13some people see that as a weakness. You see that as, no, that's a strength. Absolutely. That is
26:18absolutely the point. I'm seeing it as a strength because you're not looking at mathematics. Okay,
26:25mathematicians pick up on twistor theory and they generalize it to higher dimensions and all sorts
26:29of things. Good stuff, but it's pure mathematics. I'm interested here in specifically the
26:36mathematics which applies to the physical world. Now that, whether you can generalize that to 17
26:43dimensions is of no particular interest to me. And if people do string theory initially when I heard
26:48about string theory I thought it was a beautiful idea. And then when it went and they said oh no,
26:52it only works in, I think 26 dimensions originally I thought, okay, that's not okay, you can work on
26:59that. I'm not going to work on that. It's not physics anymore. So you mentioned C and Yang,
27:05you mentioned fiber bundles and implicitly hopf fibrations. Those are differential geometric ideas
27:11and the standard model and general relativity are based in differential geometry. Standard model
27:18is not even differential geometry, it's really flat space time really. Do you see differential
27:23geometry as what will be the language of physics in the next few decades or do you think it,
27:29you started off in algebraic geometry. Do you see algebraic as the chopped liver that should be?
27:36You're talking about my shady history here. Now it is true that when I went to Cambridge. I'm going
27:41to ask about Grothendieck soon. Well you can if you like. But it's always like saying yes. You see
27:48when I was in Cambridge doing algebraic geometry I was trying to solve a problem that my supervisor,
28:00William Hodge, had suggested. He had given a list of problems and said you can work on any of these
28:07and I didn't understand any of them. Oh the bottom one I can understand. Yeah I'll try that one. You
28:12see I think suspect it was the one that he was least interested in. I'm not sure. I think he
28:17was quite interested in it but it was not part of the march of algebraic geometry and what the
28:27my close colleague at that time Michael Atiyah would have been doing. He was the real expert on
28:33these things. I mean all these things are driven by anecdotes I'm afraid. You see Hodge suggested
28:40at one time. There were various people in my group and for one reason or another they didn't
28:45sort of connect with what I was doing. But he suggested well maybe you're not so keen. Hodge
28:50is suggesting maybe you're not so keen on the subject. I was expressing some disappointment
28:55with it I think. He said okay but maybe you prefer to work on one of the other topics. You might like
29:01to sit in on one of the other graduate students. So I did. I sat in on this class and I didn't
29:09understand a single word that went on. It was way above anything I knew at all. And I thought this
29:15graduate student if they're all like that what am I doing here? What I didn't realize is that
29:21graduate student was Michael Atiyah. Michael Atiyah was later to become a Fields Medalist,
29:28become one of the first winner of the there's another prize, mathematics prize. Dirac Medal?
29:37No no it's a play on Nobel but it's somebody else. Abel Prize. That's right the Abel Prize. He was
29:42one of the earliest winners of the Abel Prize and he became president of the Royal Society.
29:53Anyway he was obviously not your average student. It's what I mean the fact that he sort of I mean
30:00he became very important in my life later on by telling me that things I was trying to do
30:04were really cohomology which I had no knowledge about. When I found this way of doing integrals
30:10for finding yes I was interested in this just what I was trying to say in a way. The solutions that
30:18Ted Newman had found and I tried to convert them into twistor theory which I realized you could do
30:26in a way but by making twistor theory curved and you can make it curved provided you don't have
30:34any what I've related called alpha planes. I mean when you don't have beta you have alpha planes.
30:40I've got said it the wrong way but as long as you have alpha planes. Alpha planes are things which
30:44can only exist if half of the conformal curvature vanishes. When I say half it's a bit difficult
30:53to do that in space time because the signature is wrong. You can do it for the kinds of space
31:01geometries for geometries that mathematicians like because the signature is right for them. You have
31:07got all pluses. You take your metric it's all got pluses and they like that and that gives you a
31:13nice theory and you can make that what's called anti-self dual. If the vial curvature that's the
31:20conformal curvature it splits into two parts make one part zero and the other part still exists and
31:26you get these curved solutions. If you try to do that with space times and if they were real space
31:33times you can't well you can but it doesn't get you very far because the vial curvature
31:39the two parts one is the complex conjugate of the other. So if one of them is zero the other
31:45one is zero. So it's not it's conformally flat. It's not interesting as a conformal
31:51manifold. However Ted Newman didn't worry about these things that was my Pittsburgh colleague
31:58who I did a lot of work with. He was a very inspirational and inspiring character and he
32:08had this idea of sort of complexifying space in a way which was sort of half doing it and
32:14in that half doing it way you could see that you could do what I was trying to do and this led to
32:20what I would refer to later as the non-linear graviton. It's a complex space time for which
32:27this vial curvature part does vanish and so you can do twistor theory in it. In this complex
32:33space time you say what's it good for in physics? Ah well what's complex naturally in physics? Wave
32:40functions. So if you're doing complex stuff you could be doing quantum theory. So this could be a
32:46wave function of a crazy sort. So it's what I used to call a non-linear graviton. So it's the wave
32:53function of a graviton but it's not the ordinary linear wave function. You see normal quantum
32:59mechanics is linear. You can add one wave function to another and the whole point about, well not the
33:04whole point, but the big point about quantum mechanics is that you have this superposition
33:09principle. You can add states together. The wave functions is a linear thing. You can add them.
33:17Now this thing was a non-linear thing. You can't add one solution to another. It's just a solution.
33:22It's a complex solution of the vacuum Einstein equations which has this twist to it and the
33:28vial curvature vanishes and you have twistors. The kind of twistors you have are a new kind which are
33:35curved. So you can have these curved twistors. It makes sense. However it's a bit stuck if you want
33:45to have your physics out of it because it's to do with this conflict or confusion I would say
33:53in twistor theory. It's inbuilt into the whole subject. You see positive and negative frequency
33:58is what I was striving for and I sort of haven't got to that because I got a little confused in my
34:04discussion here. But you see it does turn out to do positive and negative frequency. It took a long
34:10time for me to see that. I was driven to positive and negative helicity. They could see that almost
34:16directly. The photons twist one way or the other way and that's what classical twistor theory does
34:21for you. But then if you start to do integrals and things like that you can see it's a little bit
34:25more confused and then you can see these integral things you're doing are really wave functions. And
34:30if they're wave functions, then they can have positive and negative separately, frequency,
34:36the right-handed. They can be right-handed or left-handed depending on whether it's twistors or
34:42dual twistors and they can be positive frequency as well. But you've got to talk to them about
34:48complex solutions. So it's this confusion between the two which in a sense limited twistor theory
34:55to the situations in which you have alpha planes. Now I haven't said what an alpha plane is but the
35:03vanishing of this half of the valve curvature is the integrability condition for the existence of
35:09alpha planes. If you have the alpha planes, they are the twistors. So if a plane has alpha planes,
35:16each alpha plane is associated with a twistor and that's the geometrical description. But
35:21real space-time doesn't have any alpha planes in it. It's only much more recently I consider what
35:28you do. You consider what I call bi-twistors. Now bi-twistors I described in the paper which was in
35:36honor of C.N. Yang. I'm very much delayed with this paper because I was trying to work things
35:41out. And it came out, well it's in honor of C.N. Yang's 100th birthday I should say. He's still
35:49alive as far as I'm aware. This was two years ago or something, so it came out. So I wrote this
35:54paper which was about bi-twistors and about the connection with split octonions. See I mentioned
36:02right at the beginning the Hamiltonian quaternions and you have the analog of that when you go up,
36:09these are things called octonions. It didn't take long after Hamiltonian produced its quaternions
36:15when various, several people independently discovered this generalization to these eight
36:20dimensional things which are called octonions. I was aware of the octonions and I was aware that
36:25there were split ones as well where you have four plus signs and four minus signs. And I
36:30thought maybe there's something to do with twistor theory there. I didn't know what it was. That was
36:35just a hunch at that point? Well this was what this paper was really the result because I could
36:39see how to do it. You can actually describe the split octonions. You have to have a product now,
36:46going back to what I said at the beginning, quaternions you take two, product of two gives you
36:50a third. Now it's a product of three things give you a fourth. You make one, you choose another
36:57element, make it the unit element and then this other two gives you the split octonian product.
37:02So it does give you the split octonions. I only vaguely thought maybe there's some connection at
37:09one time and later I see it really does. It gives you the split octonions. But for that you really
37:15need these things called bitwistors. You've got to combine a twistor and a dual twistor otherwise
37:21these things don't even exist. There's got to be that combination and you have a bigger space.
37:28But what's nice about it from the physics point of view is you sort of got rid of this inherent
37:33twist into the theory. They're not really twistors in the sense that the twist goes
37:39one way rather than the other. So it removes this awkward confusion between helicity and frequency.
37:49You see positive frequency and positive helicity are two different concepts. But
37:54in twistor theory they're confused as being the same. So I want to ask about definitions because
38:00when you're an undergrad people tend to think that you focus on proofs and that's what it is
38:05to be a researcher. And Grothendieck said that what's more important are definitions. So he
38:11would say you keep your definitions convoluted and you make your proofs simple. What makes a
38:16good definition in physics though? Well going back to Grothendieck you see there was this,
38:21when I was talking about my period in Cambridge I was really an outsider working on this particular
38:27problem that Hodge had suggested. Although it was a bit like twistor theory in a way. You see if you
38:31want to describe a curve and a twisted cubic is a good example. It's a twisted cubic, you don't
38:36have one equation for it. You can think of it as an intersection of two quadrics where you throw
38:41away a line. The normal intersection is a quartic surface. You specialize it so it's a line and a
38:48cubic. And that cubic is called a twisted cubic. It's not the intersection of two hypersurfaces.
38:53But can you write down an equation for it? Yes you can. You think of your space of straight lines and
39:01those straight lines which meet the curve is one condition and that gives you a formula. And this
39:06is the Cayley form thing. And that's what I was actually working on. Not that, but how do you do
39:11that in higher dimensions? How do you work out how things intersect and stuff like that? And it
39:17got rather too messy. So I had to develop a diagrammatic notation for handling all the
39:22complications. That's another story too. I won't tell you that one now. But anyway. Grothendieck.
39:31Grothendieck was the big high priest of all. I think initially it was sort of crept up before you
39:37got to Grothendieck. He was the real high priest. And that's what people like Atiyah were doing and
39:44making it more and more abstract as he went on. I was going on a completely different route. I was
39:49thinking about, okay. Something concrete? Well it was much more concrete, yes. I mean, I could think
39:54of light rays meeting curves. No, not light rays. I mean, straight lines meeting curves. That was my
40:02problem was of that character. But you do that in higher dimensions. Yeah, there's a phrase,
40:06abstract nonsense. Have you heard of that? About category theory? Oh sure, that's right. That's
40:12the whole. That's your feeling as well? The whole move of, you see that. Yeah, that's what they were
40:15all doing. To this day? That's what, Michael Atiyah was a great expert in that subject. Oh
40:21yeah. And Grotendieck was a greater expert. Well he, what was the, there was a sort of
40:28sub. I mean, Grotendieck was the, well he went off and sort of worked in isolation and disappeared
40:34from the. Sure. What do you see as the tension between gravity and quantum mechanics? So you
40:42mentioned linear. Yes. Some people think one is non-linear and the other's linear
40:45and that's where the tension is. Some people say it's non-commuting variables on one side and then
40:50commuting variables on the other. There is a big tension. Observable, sorry. But there's a worse
40:55tension. You see, there's a tension in the sense that general relativity is not really linear,
41:02it's non-linear. You see, and people in quantum mechanics, they like linear things. They don't
41:07care how many dimensions is there. It could be a million dimensions. It could be an infinite
41:10number of dimensions. Lots of things are. They love infinite dimensions. That's fine in quantum
41:15theory. But space-time has got three plus one. From that point of view, it's pretty boring.
41:22It's only got a finite number of dimensions. But the space-time has, and Einstein of course,
41:30he was good. He got his Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics, of course. But the photoelectric effect
41:36was just nothing to do with GR. Some physicists even like to say Einstein was wrong. They like
41:47to write that on a t-shirt. Well, they were all saying that then. You see, that was nothing new
41:50in those days. Of course, it was the Eddington Expedition, which suddenly startled everybody
41:59to show the bending of light was in agreement with Einstein's theory. And that did change
42:04things. It made Einstein a big celebrity too. So it was a big thing. But it didn't really make the
42:13quantum field theory or quantum people didn't like curved spaces because they're all flat spaces.
42:19They may have infinite dimensions, but they're flat as a pancake. They don't fit in very well
42:27with the basis of general relativity. And then perhaps you want me to go in that other way,
42:34because there's another way they don't fit in together, which is another thing. It's not so much
42:39twistor theory as it stands, but it's an important thing. Consciousness? Collapse? Collapse. Yes,
42:47there's consciousness, but that's... Oh dear. There are too many stories here. We're going to
42:52talk about consciousness as well. Let's stick with the collapse for now. No, the collapse
42:56is important. We have to do that first anyway. You see, I always thought that I didn't like the
43:03collapse of the wave functions being... I mean, quantum theory was terribly confused. You see,
43:09you've got the beautiful... Well, think of the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger... I mean,
43:15Schrodinger was just confused. I mean, he understood why he was confused. I mean,
43:19he was absolutely on the ball, but lots of people were confused. Anyway, let me not go into that
43:25story. You see, take a quantum system. How do you describe it? You take the wave function or vector
43:33in Hilbert space or something, isn't it a wave function? You take the wave function. How does
43:37that evolve in time? Schrodinger equation. So, it evolves in time, according to the Schrodinger
43:41equation. Is that the way the world evolves in time? No, it doesn't, because you cheat. You say,
43:48no, no, you've got to a certain point and you make a measurement. What does making a
43:53measurement mean? I don't know. People have funny ideas about making a measurement. The trouble is
43:58the word observation, I think, crept in there a little too... To sneakily, too early? Sneakily,
44:03too strongly, I would say. Because people think, as many, one of the big proponents of this view
44:13was Wigner, Eugene Wigner. And I actually, when I was in Princeton, I did talk to Wigner about it.
44:19I had a long lunch talk with him, and I talked about this issue of does the wave consciousness,
44:26if you like, collapse the wave function? Because that was the Wigner view. He was not so dogmatic
44:33about that view as I was expecting. He was saying, it's a view, but a point of view. I don't think,
44:39for many reasons, it really makes sense. But it was nevertheless, I think a lot of people,
44:45even von Neumann seemed to have that sort of idea, too. A lot of people had the idea that it
44:49was a conscious being observing the system which somehow changes the rules. You change your wave
44:57function and write it down in terms of its certain basis, and then you give the amplitudes,
45:06and then you look at these complex amplitudes, square them, square the modulus, and that makes
45:11your probabilities. So then what would they say, not to take you off track, but what would they
45:15say is what observes the observer? I don't say any of that, you see. I don't care what
45:21they say. I don't know what they say, because it's not what I say. And I think it's wrong.
45:27So although I think consciousness relates to it, the question, it's in a completely different
45:32way. It's not what collapses the wave function. What collapses the wave function is physics. So
45:40there is something in physics which collapses the wave function. The Schrodinger equation, quantum
45:45theory as a whole, is wrong. It's not Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. Now I
45:52say this very blatantly because it's a blatant topic. I mean, Einstein and Schrodinger were
45:57much more polite. They said it was incomplete. Okay. Incomplete means wrong. But you're telling
46:05it like it is. Yeah, you've got to change it so it's wrong. But incomplete is a more polite
46:12way of saying it's wrong. Okay, they're fine. I should be polite sometimes to quantum mechanics,
46:17although it's pretty robust as it is. It doesn't mind people like me being rude to it. But anyway,
46:23so Einstein and Schrodinger both thought that it was wrong, that the theory needed some amendment,
46:33could be an important amendment, which changes the nature of the whole subject, quite likely.
46:38As you know, on Theories of Everything, we delve into some of the most reality-spiraling concepts
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47:53to get started. Thanks for tuning in, and now, back to our explorations of the mysteries of
47:59the universe. So you think both Einstein's, both general relativity and quantum mechanics need to
48:09be modified, or primarily quantum mechanics and a tinge to general relativity? I would say more
48:15importantly quantum mechanics. You see, people sometimes say to combine these two great theories,
48:22you've got to quantize general relativity. Can you explain what does it mean to quantize? You
48:28mean to haul it into the framework of quantum theory. So you have, you make
48:32it into a Hilbert space and operators and goodness knows what. And you sum over metrics, or sum over
48:38geometries? Yeah, well lots of people were trying to, Wheeler was trying to do that when I was in
48:42Princeton. Yeah, lots of people were trying to do that. Bryce DeWitt was certainly trying to do
48:49that. And so when you speak to string theorists, they would say, well that's quite obviously the
48:53approach. We're the only finite quantum gravity game in town. Yes. I mean, there's nothing wrong
48:59with quantizing gravity. It's just the weak, I don't know what I'm saying. I don't read the
49:06right adjective. But let me... You don't have to be polite anymore. No, no, I'm not trying to be
49:12polite here. I'm trying to be more illustrative of what I mean. I mean, I sometimes talk about a
49:20planet, a distant planet, which has an atmosphere on it. It's a planet very much like the Earth,
49:26almost identical. And there's a space probe going out to look at it, because it's very interesting,
49:33because it's just like the Earth. However, there is no life on it. No life has ever evolved on it.
49:39There are no butterflies to flap their wings, and weather is supposed to be a chaotic thing, and so
49:45even sensitive to the flapping of a butterfly's wing. There aren't any butterflies on this planet.
49:51There are no conscious beings on that planet. So all the different weathers that they might have
49:56on that planet all coexist in superposition. It's a mess. The probe is going out to take a
50:04photograph of this mess. It comes back to the Earth, and when it's within distance of being
50:10able to send signals to the Earth, somebody's sitting against the screen, and finally the
50:15first picture of the weather on that planet, this person looks at it—snap! His consciousness or her
50:23consciousness makes that world into weather into one weather. What could be more absurd? Absolutely
50:31ridiculous. It's lightweight, it doesn't have any interest in us. Why does its weather become one?
50:38Just because this chap isn't taking a photograph of it. Absolute nonsense. I'm just trying to
50:43emphasize that I don't believe it is consciousness that collapses the wave function. Instead, it's
50:49the collapse of the wave function that produces consciousness? Well, that's my other story,
50:53which I think is another story, and is a story which I also try to pursue to some degree. I don't
51:01regard it as what I do most in my life, because it's too much biology and things like that,
51:06which I don't know anything about. Are you wedded to microtubules being the mechanism or the place?
51:12Or are you just saying, look, if it's going to occur, it needs to occur somewhere in the
51:16brain. This chap named Stuart Hameroff put up his hand and said, it could be microtubules. I found
51:21this in the brain. And then you said, okay, well, maybe. That's more or less it, yeah.
51:27Yes, it wasn't quite like that. But I do think microtubules are a good candidate for various
51:31reasons. But you wouldn't be heartbroken if it turned out to be some other structure? Heartbroken
51:35is too strong. I'd be a bit disappointed, yes. Because I think microtubules... No,
51:40there are various features of microtubules that I find fascinating. I don't think it's
51:45a coincidence. Did you see the recent news about the super radiance in microtubules?
51:50I did hear something. I didn't see it. It said that there are quantum effects that are
51:57coherent in microtubules. No, there better be, yes. Do you feel vindicated from that?
52:04The trouble is, I did look at the paper which was referred... I think it's, if it's the same
52:08one you're talking about. I did look at the paper. Stuart is mentioned. There is a reference to his,
52:14but it doesn't really talk about his stuff. It looks like something else. I don't know.
52:20I might be connected. Look, I'm not a biologist. So I'm not even a chemist. I find chemists is too
52:26difficult for me. Chemistry is, it's full of words that I can't remember. Yeah, same. I
52:31was supposed to be a doctor. My parents were both doctors. They thought I should be a doctor. They
52:35were both medically trained. I was the one they thought would be the doctor. They won in the end
52:40because my little sister eventually got a doctor and she married one too. So they got two for the
52:44price of one. No, I disappointed them terribly. I would have been hopeless because I don't remember
52:50names of these things. You can tell, I forget them immediately. I would have been putting the wrong
52:55prescription on people's... Well, you invented quite a few. Biotwistors, dual twistors, alpha
53:00planes, beta planes. Well, yes. I remember most of those more easily, yes. So I'm jumping ahead
53:06because the audience is familiar with that gravity has something to do with the collapse of the wave
53:10function. Yes, but let me make that a little more specific. You see, I wasn't so clear on that until
53:16much more later. I think just a little before the turn of the century. I can't quite remember then.
53:23It took me a little while before I actually wrote the paper on it. I wrote a paper on it
53:27which was to explain a conflict between the two basic principles, one of general relativity,
53:37the other of quantum mechanics. What's the basic principle of general relativity? It's the
53:43principle of equivalence, which Einstein admitted. He didn't give Galileo credit. I think he should
53:50have given a reference to Galileo. I'm not sure he did. Because Galileo already noticed the principle
53:57of equivalence. And he talked about... I like the one of the fireworks. He describes his fireworks.
54:03Go out and they make this beautiful sphere of sparks. As it falls, it remains a sphere. You can
54:10get rid of gravity by free fall locally. He's very explicit. Not just the big rocks and the little
54:18rocks and why the feather doesn't because of air resistance and all that. I mean, he was right. But
54:26of course, you needed special relativity and make that into a four-dimensional space-time
54:34as Minkowski did, and then bend it as Einstein did. So the collapse and gravity come in? But
54:42my argument is that the principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity, is in
54:49conflict with the principle of superposition. And the argument... is more or less this. I say, think
54:59of an experiment done in a lab on a tabletop. And you want to take the Earth's gravitational
55:06field into consideration. Now, there are two ways you might do this. The way any sensible physicist
55:12would do it, you put a term in the Hamiltonian. If you don't know what that means, don't worry. Put
55:17a term in the Hamiltonian for the gravitational field. And just chug away the usual procedures.
55:23Fine. Then you notice that Einstein's sitting in the corner, or Galileo even, and say, no, no, no,
55:30you shouldn't do it that way. The gravitational field of the Earth is locally just like free fall.
55:36So you can consider your lab, your coordinates are falling, and the lab is just accelerating in this
55:44thing. And there's no gravitational field. Okay, you do it this other way. It's a different way.
55:49Different coordinates, you do it a way. And you come up, eventually, you come up with almost the
55:55same answer. The key, of course, is in the almost. The wave function you get is just the same,
56:04except for the complex multiplier. The phase factor, if you like, which people would quite
56:12like to discard, because when they're going to measure anything that you observe, they're taking
56:16amplitudes, you take squares and moduli. So you don't worry too much about that. Until you look
56:21rather too carefully at this actual factor, which is different between these two procedures, that
56:28actual factor involves the time, an exponential of the time cubed. And that is not, that's serious,
56:39if you really think of it. If you're thinking of quantum field theory, that's serious, because
56:43that's telling you that's a different vacuum. You're actually working in a different vacuum.
56:50So you might say, well, you still might say who cares, because you say stick to your vacuum, and
56:57you get the right answer at the end. Okay, so I'm going to change the problem a little bit, rather
57:04seriously, actually. I'm going to say that in this experiment, there is a lump of some sort, which
57:13is put into a superposition of two locations. So it's a little stone, which goes into two places,
57:19a little bead or something, which is part of the experiment. Now, I try to use the Einsteinian,
57:26Galilean Einsteinian perspective, and I ran into trouble, because as I get close to the bead,
57:32I see that whether it's here or here, I can't get rid of them both at once. And that's, of course,
57:38the Einstein problem, which is a general relativity. I can't get rid of them both at once,
57:43by free fall. So what do I do? I do what any sensible physicist would do, I cheat. I say, okay,
57:51I know I should be using the Einstein perspective, but let's just try instead, measure the mistake
57:58that I'm making by adopting that, by the Newtonian perspective. So I adopt the Newtonian perspective,
58:05but keep track of what might be a little error in doing it. Then I integrate that error over space,
58:13and I do a little integration by parts and some little bit of fiddling around with it. And I get
58:19with an answer, which looks like a uncertainty in the mass of a system. It is the mass of
58:28the system, but it's not the fact that it's a superposition that gives me an uncertainty of that
58:36mass. Now the thing is, that's a bit like particle physics, where if you have a decaying particle,
58:46its mass is not completely well-defined. It has an error, a fuzziness in its mass, which is given by
58:53the Heisenberg time-energy uncertainty principle. So its lifetime, if it's an unstable particle, is
59:00inversely related to this sort of fuzziness in its mass. Now here I have a fuzziness in the energy of
59:11the system, the mass energy of the system, so I say that's the reciprocal of that in natural
59:17units. When I say natural units, I mean making all the things equal to one that you can do,
59:24as Dirac sort of pointed out, I guess. And I get the formula, which Diosi had already discovered
59:32a couple of years earlier than me. Right, for different reasons. I didn't know he'd done that.
59:37It was a different argument. But I thought this was a nice argument because it just revealed the
59:42tension between these two very basic principles, the principle of equivalence and the principle of
59:48superposition. And they're a bit in conflict with each other. And the resolution of this
59:54conflict comes through allowing your unstable state to collapse into one or the other. Now,
1:00:03what you only get from this way of looking at it is an uncertainty in the mass. And I
1:00:09know that Ivette's looking directly at this thing rather than looking at the collapse,
1:00:14which is a powerful thing to exploit. And just for people who are wondering about Ivette Fuentes,
1:00:20there's a podcast on screen right now where we go into two hours in depth into this topic. Now,
1:00:26do you have a mechanism for why or how gravity collapses the wave function? Or do you just say
1:00:32it has to collapse? I said that's where the new theory has to come in. I'm just saying,
1:00:37look, I have a problem. I need a theory. No, all I can say is that it tells me how big the factor
1:00:45should be. It tells you, you can measure this uncertainty. And it's not so hard. You just think
1:00:49of the bead that I was looking at. Imagine the two copies of the same bead. And I move it into this
1:00:57superposition. And I ask, how much energy would that cost me where I ignore all forces except
1:01:04gravity? Very tiny usually, but it's nevertheless. It's enough to collapse the state for any, even a
1:01:14flick of dust will collapse in a very short period of time. So it gives you that much. I mean, it's
1:01:19the same as Diosi. It's the same formula. It's not a theory in the sense that his was. I mean,
1:01:25I think his ideas got, as far as I'm aware, rather shot down by the Gran Sasso experiments,
1:01:33was it? They took this thing down a mineshaft or something. No, it's to do with the heating. They
1:01:39anticipate bodies spontaneously heat, which I don't want. That shouldn't happen. But that's
1:01:45because the collapse has a very curious... You see, if you want to make it consistent with
1:01:50special relativity, don't worry about general relativity at the moment, you're really already
1:01:54in trouble because you imagine a body going, splitting. It's the superposition. It's not
1:01:59two bodies. It's one body, superposition of here and here. They get very far away from each other.
1:02:04They haven't collapsed yet. And now they're going to collapse. One goes. In whose frame does that
1:02:11happen? Is that the frame you should be talking about? How do you make that consistent? Well,
1:02:18what you've got to do... I mean, I worried about that. Lots of people seem not to worry about that.
1:02:23I worried about that. You say, okay, the only thing you can do, which is relativistic... I mean,
1:02:29there are other wrong routes you can take, which I won't go into because it's quite a bit of a more
1:02:33story than I'm making out here. The only route you can take is to say the collapse actually
1:02:39took place right back to where the split initially took, and then there was only one route. But what
1:02:46about the other route? Well, what I have to do is to describe things in terms of two different kinds
1:02:54of reality. One of them is quantum reality, and one of them is classical reality. So one doesn't
1:03:01give rise to the other? They're actually separate? Well, it's the quantum reality,
1:03:05if you like, which does give rise to the way that the classical reality behaves, but it does it in
1:03:10a kind of retrocausal way. So that's what's so confusing. In a kind of retrocausal way? Or is
1:03:16it retrocausal? It's kind of retrocausal. Okay, explain. I'm saying this deliberately because it's
1:03:23only quantum reality. You see, this is a puzzle I had, and you can resolve this in a rather peculiar
1:03:32way. You might say, oh sure, if it was retrocausal and it went back to the beginning, then how do
1:03:40you... what am I trying to say? You can travel faster than light. Yeah, you can travel faster
1:03:45than light or backwards in time or something. Sure. So I've got to tackle that problem. Or you
1:03:50can signal backwards in time, that's the thing. And you were trying to retain special relativity
1:03:56before? I'm just saying you can't do that. Think of Alice and Bob. I had this in some notes which
1:04:04I circulated, but I don't think it was actually published. It's sort of pseudo-published. You see,
1:04:10I have a book. The book I wrote, which was with the Princeton University Press, called Fashion,
1:04:19Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. The fashion was about string theory,
1:04:26which I'm not sure was still so fashionable now, but it was then. Faith was quantum mechanics
1:04:31at all levels. And fantasy actually had to do with cosmology. It was to do with inflationary
1:04:38cosmology, because I simply thought inflation is much too fantastic. That's another story.
1:04:44But the fashion... so I had to write this new preface. I think it's almost out now,
1:04:51a new printing of Fashion, Faith. I wasn't allowed to change anything in the book,
1:04:55but I was allowed to write a new preface. And I do give an outline of this idea. I think I
1:05:01do. The retrocausal thing. You see, the thing is, think about the standard EPR. So you have a spin
1:05:09zero state, splits into two halves, spin half, and Alice takes one off in the spaceship and Bob takes
1:05:18it up on another half. Alice makes a measurement. What do I say happens to the quantum reality? It's
1:05:26a quantum measurement. Quantum reality propagates along the past light cone. What could be crazier
1:05:33than that? The backwards way, along the past light cone. It hits Bob's world line way earlier than he
1:05:41does his experiment. So his state is already changed into the one which is the opposite of
1:05:48Alice's state. Bob makes his measurement later. He doesn't know what the state is.
1:05:56Alice can only communicate classically with him. This is a quantum information. Now,
1:06:04quantum reality information. Quantum reality, you cannot measure, you can only ascertain.
1:06:11Explain the difference between ascertaining and confirming. Because when you were on stage with
1:06:16Sabine Hossenfelder, you said you can confirm, I think it was the classical level, you can confirm,
1:06:22whereas at the quantum you can ascertain. Like you can ask a question. That's right. Well,
1:06:27you see, it's really Einstein. It's Einstein's fault. Because he was saying, I think a lot of
1:06:36people were worrying about the reality of the wave function. Is it real? Is it really there?
1:06:43Not real, it's complex, you see. It's not real in the sense of real numbers, but is it really there?
1:06:50And Einstein produced the statement. He said, well, a concept of reality isn't introducing,
1:06:56which is if you can make, if there's a measurement you can make on the system without disturbing it,
1:07:02and which with 100% certainty gives the answer yes, then that measurement is revealing an element
1:07:09of reality. So he says that the state, the quantum state is real in that sense. What he didn't say,
1:07:17as far as I'm aware, is that is quantum reality. It's not classical reality. Think
1:07:23of the spin of a spin-half particle. I always like spin-half particles. Sure. Spin up and spin down,
1:07:31if you like, or spin right and spin left. Suppose its spin is about that way. If I know through its
1:07:39origin, where did that spin come from? Oh, yes, I know. Oh, it should be spinning that way. Wait,
1:07:43sorry. Is this a hidden variable that it's carrying with it? No, no. It's not hidden
1:07:46variables. Forget about Bohm. Forget about Bohm. You're not a fan of Bohm. I had arguments with
1:07:54Basil Hiley on that topic, and I prefer not to go back there, when I was at Birkbeck College.
1:07:59All right. Let's not talk about hidden variables. If you can call them hidden variables, you can,
1:08:05but that's not my idea. It's not that. Got it. It's quantum reality. So the state is that, but
1:08:12it has a quantum reality of spinning right-handed about that particular direction. And we know it
1:08:18is because we've set up and we've produced it in that state. You could do that by some experiment,
1:08:25and it comes out in that state. Now, I'm going to use Einstein's criterion. I can measure the
1:08:31spin in that direction, as long as it's got a magnetic dipole or something. I can measure it,
1:08:39and I can... If I've got it right, every time I measure it, or I can measure the same experiment
1:08:46many times over, 100% certainly, that's real. That's what Einstein said is his element of
1:08:53reality. I'm just slightly modifying what he said. It's an element of quantum reality. It's
1:09:01not classical reality. I can't say to the state, hello, state, which way are you pointing? Just
1:09:08looks at you blankly. It says, I don't answer questions like that. Give me a better question,
1:09:13you see. If I say, are you spinning that way? It can say, no, or yes. If you say,
1:09:19which way are you spinning? It doesn't answer that question. That's a quantum reality thing. Quantum
1:09:25reality doesn't. You can't ascertain it. That's why I say you can't ascertain. You can't ascertain
1:09:34which way it's spinning. However, you can confirm which way it's spinning by the Einstein criteria.
1:09:40I see. Now, if Alice and Bob, you see, if Alice propagates back in time, Bob's state is already,
1:09:48in a certain sense, the opposite of what Alice is going to measure, but Bob can't ask the state,
1:09:57which way are you spinning? If he could, then you could send signals faster than that. The
1:10:02whole of special relativity goes down the tubes. The whole of modern physics does. So that's not
1:10:08a good idea. So quantum reality, sure. Bob can't say, hey, can I ask it? His spinning state says,
1:10:17don't ask me such a question. I don't answer questions like that. Suggests a direction. So
1:10:22he does. He suggests a different direction. He has no idea what Alice has spinned. I did
1:10:27worry about this quite a lot by saying, can he ascertain which way Alice is measuring it,
1:10:33and even if you don't know which answer she gets? So there's a bit of a subtlety there, because she
1:10:38might orient her apparatus in some way, and does that information somehow, you want to make sure
1:10:45that can't be ascertained by Bob either. Uh-huh, that she's free to choose independently? She's
1:10:50free to choose. She says, yeah, but she might say, oh, I think I'm gonna choose that direction
1:10:55because Bob's keen on that direction or something, and that will tell me I'm happy. No, she can't do
1:11:01that. Have you thought about free will? I've thought about it. In fact, I thought about it
1:11:08even quite recently. First of all, I think it's a useless kind of thought because even though,
1:11:14you see, Stuart is very keen on free will because he says that this theory of microtubules and all
1:11:21that stuff gives a room for free will. See, maybe it does in a way, but you see, often people say,
1:11:29well, it's all determined anyway, and so I think people get a little bit confused. You see,
1:11:37going back to my experiences I used to have when I was very young, and my younger brother was even
1:11:43younger, and he could always wallop me at this game, scissors, paper, stone, and I thought, how
1:11:48can he be walloping at that game of chance? Right. So to make sure it was a game of chance that he
1:11:53couldn't wallop me at, I went into my father's study and I got out a book of logarithms and
1:11:58went into the middle of it and got out the string of numbers and produced which way you went by the
1:12:02string of numbers, followed it very carefully, and he couldn't beat me. So I thought, thank goodness.
1:12:09He's not reading my mind. It's just that he knows, that's recognizing patterns and things like that.
1:12:15He's good at that. Maybe even unconsciously, he recognized these patterns and he knows which way
1:12:20I'm going to do next because I'm not really being random. So it's not randomness. Yes.
1:12:25The free will is not randomness. So what is it? You see, maybe I thought, I think it's probably,
1:12:36you're free to do something which may be very well determined. You see, you might, do I take course A
1:12:44or course B? You may be in some meeting, you see, which is making decisions about some big plan. And
1:12:50you want to know, what is the consequence of doing A or B? Well, then you rely on your understanding
1:13:00of which is the right thing to do. So free will, it might be the same as somebody would do just by
1:13:05chance. That's not the point. The point is that you've used your consciousness as something to
1:13:13employ in making your decision. So that's what free will is for in a sense. I don't know if I
1:13:22can say much more. And I also get impressed by things when I hear things about bees and
1:13:27they're unbelievable. Yeah. And they seem to play. They're unbee-lievable. Unbee-lievable. Yes, well,
1:13:34they sort of, even they play football. There's some, see, they were telling me about little,
1:13:41they're not trying to hunt for honey. They do things in little balls and they kick them
1:13:46around. There's some kind of football that they play. Why are they doing that? For fun? That
1:13:53would mean they have to be conscious, doesn't it? Maybe they are. I don't know. I don't have a view
1:13:58on this. I do believe that consciousness goes way down in the animal kingdom, sure. Is the universe
1:14:04discreet or continuous? I used to be very keen on discreet. I did, yes. People tell me, oh,
1:14:10I got to go into anecdotes. I'm too old. I just talk about anecdotes in the physics. Okay. If you
1:14:15want an anecdote, I can give you an anecdote. I used to be very keen on discreteness. There were
1:14:20two things in mathematics that I thought, oh, these are the nice things for physics,
1:14:25ultimately, to be based on. Combinatorial things or maybe complex numbers. I think I sort of,
1:14:31at that time, thought combinatorial things. I'm surprised. If you came from algebraic geometry,
1:14:36that you would be more keen to the finite side, the discreet side. I probably was at that time.
1:14:43You see, I had this sort of gradual conversion. I think the conversion came with David Finkelstein.
1:14:50When, as he said after his talk, he gave this talk that Dennis Sharma took me to when I was
1:14:55a research fellow at St. John's in Cambridge, and we drove to London to hear this lecture given by
1:15:02David Finkelstein, which was on the Schwarzschild horizon, which is not a singular, it's a horizon.
1:15:09Sure. And he described that. And I found that amazing. I thought it was very beautiful. At the
1:15:14end of the talk, I had a long chat with him about spin networks. So I described the spin networks to
1:15:19him. And he told me afterwards that this meeting, we swapped subjects. I did gen relativity from
1:15:26then on, and he had been doing GR. He swapped on to combinatorics. I consider I got much the better
1:15:31deal. But that's, you see, I was thinking about combinatorial things. Spin networks are very much
1:15:38that kind of thing. Can you not think about the complex numbers which give you the directions of
1:15:43spin for a spin-half particle, or do you instead think about this network, which is really the
1:15:48important thing, and the direction comes out of the network? I was playing with that idea.
1:15:56You said you've changed your tune now to be on the more continuous side, or continuum side. Well,
1:16:01the power of complex analysis was the other thing which has impressed me. And
1:16:06it's more drifted onto that side. Do you think the continuous lies at the classical level, and then
1:16:11the discreteness lies at the quantum one? Do you think that's the way to quote-unquote unify them,
1:16:17or harmonize them? I wouldn't say anything like that. I mean, maybe. Obviously, there's something
1:16:27discreet in quantum mechanics. I mean, something which people used to think was continuous, shock,
1:16:33shock, is actually discreet. Now, speaking of what people used to think, you used to think
1:16:39that AI couldn't do what mathematicians do. Do you still hold that view because of their limitations,
1:16:47their formal systems? In a certain sense, yes. I mean, you've got to be a little careful
1:16:51about these things. But I was hearing just recently, I think it was on Zoom talk. Yeah,
1:16:57the remarkable 01 model of ChatGPT. What would be an example of something mathematical that
1:17:05you think a computer could never do this? Well, it doesn't do anything. You've got to tell him. Well,
1:17:12even if you put it on play, you just press play, and you say, generate for me some math. Because if
1:17:18it's the autoplay that's the issue here, that's easily solvable. I mean, there's a confusion,
1:17:23I think. I mean, it's also important to me. See, because one of the talks that I attended when I
1:17:28was a graduate student at Cambridge, nothing to do with what I was doing, was a talk by a man
1:17:33called Steen on mathematical logic. And I learned about the notion of computability. I learned about
1:17:42the Gödel theorem. I found it stunning, because what it told me, you want to prove something in
1:17:49mathematics? How is this statement? What the Gödel theorem says, it says, I am not provable by your
1:17:56methods. Yet, I know it's true. Why do I know it's true? I know it's true by virtue of my belief that
1:18:05the proof procedures only give you truths. There is the idea that people can brain upload. That is,
1:18:12they can take your consciousness and put it onto a computer? No, I'm saying no on that one,
1:18:17definitely. If a computer, when you say the word computer, you have to be saying what I mean by
1:18:23a computer, and what Turing meant by a computer, which is a computational system. So if it's that,
1:18:30no is the answer. If you're talking about a physical entity, which is not an animal,
1:18:35or not a living being in our ordinary sense of the word, maybe. But it has to take advantage
1:18:40of what we're taking advantage of without even worrying about it. Which is, presumably,
1:18:48here I'm going way outside of what I know, but I'm saying it's whatever the physics is which
1:18:53governs the collapse of the wave function. Right. Now that is not quantum physics, because quantum
1:18:58physics doesn't have an answer to that question. It's this physics which combines GR with quantum
1:19:03mechanics. Maybe it used multi-twistors for all I know, I have no idea. It would be very nice if it
1:19:09does. Do you think if quantum theory was not to be modified, then the many worlds interpretation
1:19:15is the way to go? It would just be wrong. I'd say it could be any way people believe in. Stick to
1:19:23quantum mechanics, that wrong theory, then they would have to go that way. But I don't want to
1:19:27go that way, because I want to go the way that the world goes. Oh, what I mean to say is, do
1:19:32you think quantum theory as it stands implies the many worlds theory? Quantum mechanics doesn't say
1:19:41anything about the many worlds theory. Yeah, in a sense, yes, because it says all these things are
1:19:46in superposition. But I'm not quite sure what the many worlds theory is, because it can't be just
1:19:51that. Otherwise, I wouldn't see just one world. So what is the rest of the theory which tells me that
1:19:57I only see a limited proportion that may be there in superposition, but not many? Certainly not as
1:20:03different as they could be. I don't see all these alternatives. Now, is that to do with this little
1:20:10creature crawling through this multitude? Now, why doesn't this creature going off in another
1:20:17branch? It doesn't explain anything. Recently... I'm just saying it's wrong. You're trying to say
1:20:25if I believed in quantum mechanics, yes, but then I can believe in a wrong thing and I get another
1:20:29wrong answer. I'm just being my rude self to say that quantum theory is wrong. We like that on
1:20:36theories of everything. So, you were recently speaking to Bernardo Kastrup about idealism,
1:20:44which is about consciousness as fundamental. So maybe you don't recall, but it doesn't matter.
1:20:48The point is some people believe consciousness to be fundamental. Was this a video thing? Yeah. No,
1:20:54I think I did recover that. Okay. Yes, I think he was saying things which seemed to
1:20:59me orthogonal to what I was saying. Okay, so please recount your views on is consciousness
1:21:06fundamental? Yes and no. How's that for an answer? A superposition answer. It depends at what level
1:21:16you're asking this question. I mean, if there were no consciousness, I can't see... You see,
1:21:28a question like this has to have a framework. You see, I'm talking within a certain framework
1:21:34of theories. What's something that you used to be dismissive of when you were younger that you used
1:21:41to disregard, repudiate? Many-worlds theory. As you're older, that you're more open to it. Oh,
1:21:47I see. Oh, no, no. I'm worse. I've got more narrow-minded as I've got older. Interesting. Oh,
1:21:54yes. I'm terribly narrow-minded now. I'm prepared to listen to other things, sure. But I... No,
1:22:02I think CCC is right. I think that collapse of the wave function is right and it's a gravitational
1:22:07effect. Can you talk about that, about the CCC? Now? Yeah. Just briefly, if you don't mind. Sure.
1:22:15Well, it was one thing when I was saying fashion, faith and fantasy. The fantasy was inflation. See,
1:22:21I don't believe in inflation. Right. The current view of cosmology is that the very early stages
1:22:26of the universe, first tiny fraction of a second, there was this inflationary phase.
1:22:31Which was supposed to smooth out the universe and that's why it seems so uniform. Now, it's a load
1:22:37of poppycock as far as I'm concerned. I don't know about that word to use here. It's probably
1:22:41poppycock's early mouth. Because if you reverse time, it gives you the wrong answer. I mean,
1:22:49black hole singularities are... I mean, any theory which would iron out singularities
1:22:54should iron out the singularities in black holes. They're completely different. The singularities
1:23:00in black holes are absolutely wildly diverging via curvature. The singularity in the Big Bang
1:23:10was an extraordinarily special event. I haven't seen any explanation of this. I had various wrong
1:23:19explanations of my own. I thought maybe quantum... Yes, when you have quantum theory, I was trying to
1:23:27say that singularities had to be one way around. What would you like your legacy to be? It's really
1:23:35fairly equally split, I think, between CCC on the one hand, the cosmological picture, and well,
1:23:43the wave functions. You see, the theory there is not developed enough to anything there. It
1:23:47needs much more. You see, the theory, that's more twisted. twistors and their offspring.
1:23:55And I'm hoping that... You see, when I talked about... I talked to too many people today. Did I
1:24:02talk to you about the product of three vectors? I did, didn't I? Yes. Yes. You see, you multiply...
1:24:08In twistor theory, in bi-twistor theory, you have a product of three things gives you a fourth. And
1:24:15this is useful if you want to talk about split space. But there's another thing which might
1:24:19be useful for. Those three... It's really the span of those three things. It's like a vector product.
1:24:25It's not your... It's you lost the vectors. It's really the span of the two. It's the way you talk
1:24:31about the plane. So with the three things, it's the way you talk about a three space. Now that's
1:24:37awfully tempting to me to think that that might have something to do with strong interactions.
1:24:44That it's the SU3. That's where the SU3 resides. See, in one of my conversations with Feynman,
1:24:51they're all stories, and each one is a nice story. But I had a conversation with Feynman, which
1:24:57Stephen Hawking had organized. And he was a bit grumpy because Stephen had disturbed his holiday.
1:25:05But anyway, and I was trying to describe twistor theory to him. And then I was trying to describe
1:25:10how you might describe particle physics in it. And he said, don't follow that route. He said,
1:25:19what I said about twistors, it's very interesting. Yes, keep that going. But don't try to follow that
1:25:24particular route towards particle physics. That's wrong. That's not a fruitful route. And he was
1:25:31completely right. That was wrong. It was much too early. So we tried to do particle physics with
1:25:38twistors, putting a few of them together and all that. And I think that was wrong. I think he was
1:25:44right. He was right that I was wrong. However, it doesn't mean that the thing with bi-twistor,
1:25:50it's much more like what, it's more like SU3 because you really don't care where the
1:25:55vectors are. It's the space. And it's a way of attributing another entity to it. I don't know
1:26:01if I can say what I mean. It's a bit more like the other exact gauge theory there is in physics,
1:26:06which is electromagnetism. And you do have a thing like this in Biotwistor theory as well.
1:26:11You have this thing which I call multiplying by I. I needed that as well. So it's another, it's
1:26:16a circle. So you have this circle and you have this three-dimensional space. The question is,
1:26:24what do you want your legacy to be? Well, I say it's a twistor theory, you see. But CCC is quite
1:26:30a good one for a legacy, I guess. Because it does change our picture of cosmology completely.
1:26:37Do you believe it to be the case? Or do you just posit that as a possibility? Look, it's
1:26:42a completely different story. In this case, there is strong evidence that nobody pays any attention
1:26:48to. But I say nobody, not quite anybody. About conformal cyclic cosmology? We see these signals.
1:26:55I mean, there isn't a nice wrongness about them, too. Okay. But the wrongness is just a factor of
1:27:02two. I mean, all these are anecdotes. As I say, I'm too old to do physics. I just do anecdotes.
1:27:09No, I had Zoom, not Zoom. This was just email communication with Alan Guth about… Cosmology?
1:27:19Yes. That's right. And he was telling me about… I'm giving him all the credit. He put our boots
1:27:27on and followed exactly what we should do in our calculations. And he said, your calculation of how
1:27:34big the Hawking points are, these are spots which we claim are there in the… They're observed with
1:27:41strong observational 99.98% confidence level. Particle physicists tell me that's much too
1:27:47small. You need much more confidence level than that. It's only about three sigma or something.
1:27:52I don't know what all that means, but that's what they tell me. But still, for cosmology,
1:27:57that's a pretty confident level. And these spots are there. They're all the same size. They're all
1:28:07about eight times the diameter of the full moon. Alan Guth tells me, you're wrong. They should be
1:28:14four times the diameter. He doesn't tell me the diameter. He tells in terms of radians or
1:28:19minutes of arc or something. I forget what that means. So I'm used to the full moon. I'm using my
1:28:25low grade… They're only four times. He said they should be four times. So I email Christoph and I
1:28:30say, look, Alan Guth tells me that we got the wrong size. They're not eight. They're only
1:28:34four times. Christoph tells me, no, that can't be right. I go and check. But sure,
1:28:39he's just made a mistake. He comes back to me. He's right. They should only be four times. So
1:28:48we have to do something with our theory. We have an idea what you should do. It doesn't change the
1:28:54whole scheme. I mean, ordinary cosmology doesn't get them at all. Getting just a factor of two
1:28:59wrong is mild. It's minimal. And they're seen both in WMAP and in Planck. I'm only counting the ones
1:29:07which are strongest and which are the strongest ones, which are the same ones as seen both in
1:29:15WMAP and Planck. There are five points. When I say points, there are these little spots in the sky,
1:29:21five of them, which we see in exactly the same places in WMAP and in Planck. Confidence
1:29:27level calculated by Christoph, because I don't know how to do that kind of thing,
1:29:3299.98% confidence level. People contact me and say they don't believe us. Well, people say, no,
1:29:40I've done the calculus all by a different way, and I only get 95% confidence level. Okay, well,
1:29:46you could use your method if you like, but that's not interesting to me. You just outlined how you'd
1:29:52like to be remembered in physics. And I'm curious how you'd like to be remembered as a person. As a
1:29:59person? Not too much of an idiot, I hope. Well, look, there's a book coming out any minute. I'd
1:30:05better read it first. And I'll see how it tells me how I might be remembered by people. I don't
1:30:11know. Who's taking on the torch that you're passing? Who are the people? Yeah. And what is
1:30:21that torch? Briefly speaking. Well, there's more than one of them, you see. There's one in twistor
1:30:25theory. I don't know who's carrying it on twistor theory, because it's gone. You see, if I'm talking
1:30:32about twistor theory, there's three versions. No, the answer is there's pseudo-twistor theory and
1:30:39twistor theory and pseudo-twistor theory. And then pseudo-twistor theory done by the mathematicians,
1:30:45which is all positive definite space. The pseudo-twistor done by Ed Witten and company has
1:30:50got two time dimensions and two space dimensions. Those are pseudo because the dimension is wrong.
1:30:57Mine has got one time and three space. So I'm calling that the real twistor theory. Now, the
1:31:02number of people doing real twistor theory is not very big. The ones who do pseudo-twistor theory is
1:31:07quite huge, particularly the mathematics people. It's quite a big subject now. But it's not my
1:31:13twistor theory because it's still pseudo-twistor theory. What's your advice to students who are
1:31:19getting into the field of theoretical physics? And what are your views on academia as it stands now?
1:31:27I think there's probably too much domination by things you do on computers. I'm not quite
1:31:34sure what I mean there. I don't know. I mean, I don't really, I don't know most of what people
1:31:40do in physics, and I can't really comment. So I can't be rude about it. It shouldn't be rude
1:31:44about things I don't know. I think it's difficult to shake. I've noticed that in cosmology. You see,
1:31:51this is a scheme. I'm talking about CCC now, which is not taken seriously simply because it's too
1:31:59outrageous. It is outrageous. So if somebody had mentioned it to me before I thought about it, I
1:32:04might have thought it's not worth thinking about. I did even have a session with Stephen Hawking,
1:32:09me and Stephen and nobody else, and I described CCC to him. I don't know what he thought of it. He
1:32:15came away without saying a word. Though he asked me one question which showed he didn't completely
1:32:19understand what I'd said. So I tried to get that straight. I don't think he believed a word of what
1:32:24I said. What do I do? Well, it's outrageous. The theory is outrageous. I agree with that. Doesn't
1:32:31mean it's wrong. There's evidence for it. Then it solves the problem of the specialness of the
1:32:37Big Bang. Nothing else does that I've seen. Now just imagine you're speaking to students
1:32:43and they want to know what advice do you have, sir? I think when people ask me that question,
1:32:47apart from being completely flummoxed, I say do what excites you. I mean, you have to concentrate.
1:32:55In doing physics or research in general, you have to have your area which you concentrate on,
1:33:01but you've also got to have a broader area. So it's a bit like a funnel like this. You go way
1:33:05down deep in the area you're interested in, but you should keep an interest in what's going on
1:33:11all the time as well. So don't shut your eyes to what the rest of the world. Then you may
1:33:16see a connection which nobody else has spotted. Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
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