Lee Smolin: String Theory Is Still Wrong (152)

Is string theory still our best hope for a Theory of Everything?

Brian plzzz the sound in the background does not go well the voice and speech. You can have the audio but it has to be different. You can hire an audio engineer for cheap and they will pick out the type of music that does go well and mix it so it all sounds right. Please I love your work but this makes it unbearable to listen.

Lee is a great thinker. He is always honest with himself and always honest with the rest of us as well. Physics needs more of that.

First of all, I absolutely love your interviews and your deep knowledge in so many areas. My only request is: please, please, please lose that random background music that shows up in the podcast lately. It makes the interviews unlistenable to me. Am I the only one? It wouldn’t be the first time I’m an army of one :)

The background music is distracting and annoying. Why the hell mix that in to a podcast??????

Background music is painfull to my ears (much to lood)... Specialy with such an interesting subject !

I'm just echoing what others have already said, namely that the random music not only adds nothing - but detracts.

Smolin is a total picnic to listen to. Keating doesn't bother but ask the highest pertinent questions. Great conversation between the two. Thanks for this !

Brian, it's so fantastic how you keep expressing your deep personal admiration for your guests, even though they sometimes hold deeply contradictory views. That gratitude for people's work and commitment (also shared by Lee) is in my mind what a field needs in order to be as good as it can be - both in terms of technical results, but also in terms of value to humanity. And this is also one of the reasons why I (from my amateur's point of view) hold Lee as one of the most important people to his field.

Great fan of your but please lose this background music esp when someone like Lee Smolin is speaking. We want to concentrate on what the man is saying when is already very frail and faint of voice.

The string theory offers a solution to a problem created by the string theory itself.

Kindly give links to the papers u mentioned in the video. Great great work by the way Sir. Respect...

Lee is a wise, intelligent and good man. You can just hear it when he speaks and in what he says.

Great content, just wish the audio quality on the guest's end was better

If Einstein was right with E=MC^2 then there is only one building block of the Universe, and that is Energy. The first question has to be what is the nature of the actual energy itself. Energy as we experience it is confined by a field, the Higgs Field. So that is a second building block which by Einstein’s theory must be energy in a different form to that of Matter Energy. Consider for a moment what properties Energy without a constraint field would have? It is logical that energy without constraint is infinite and therefore dimensionless for both space and time. Space and Time are emergent properties of spontaneous transition of infinite energy to energy with two properties which I suggest could be thought of as Dynamic Energy and Static Energy where Static Energy is the Higgs Field. Energy as we observe it is either moving (photons, electrons, quarks, neutrinos, gluons, etc) or static in the form of fields that mediate the nature of the dynamic energy passing through it. If you look at the universe from that perspective every thing we experience are emergent properties of the confinement of the dynamic form of energy which I perceive to be string like in nature and everything we know are clues as to how dynamic energy is contained within the field. So string theory is the only solution consistent with the fundamentals.

TIME = MOTION —> at any scale, which means that any form of change, even within solid states, requires an agent in motion.

I really like Lee Smolin. I've read his books including, "The Trouble with Physics." He was objecting to String Theory long before others had joined the chorus. When I think about physics, I see an elephant in the room. And that elephant is quantum entanglement. How can it be that two particles can seemingly communicate faster than the speed of light? To me, this is the big clue that's winking at everyone in the physics community. It's telling us that Einstein's relativity is incomplete. Perhaps there is more to reality than our classical 4D spacetime? QE suggests a broader theory that includes higher dimensions and/or more exotic geometries that allows quantum entangled particles to communicate without violating special relativity - when viewed in this new framework. Of course, the broader theory will have to recover special and general relativity in our familiar 4D spacetime. QE is imploring us to find a better theory of spacetime. I also suspect that once this new theory is discovered that explains how QE actually works, then quantum gravity may likely fall out of the equations as well. I'm not a theoretical physicist, but I am a mathematician, and this is what I think.

To everyone complaining about the background music, I think that was on Dr. Smolin's end. Because it seems to only play while he is speaking. He may have had his rebellious teenage grandson's garage band practicing downstairs 😂😂

I rarely comment. Brian, this was one of your best podcasts. You got Smolin to braindump and you let him talk uninterrupted.

I was surprised, delighted and moved by the closing segment. Especially your teleportation riff. Just splendid. Thank you so much! Both of you. Wow.