## Transcript **0:00** · The Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory, also known as Orch OR, is a controversial theory proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. It suggests that consciousness is spawned from quantum computations in microtubules within neurons, positing that these computations collapse in a specific manner guided by gravity, leading to moments of conscious experience. While Orch OR has attracted attention for its ambitious sculpt and because its creator is a legend in the field, it still remains highly speculative. Many scientists, including Scott Aaronson, are skeptical. **0:32** · Critics argue that the brain is too wet and warm and noisy for quantum coherence to play a significant role. Interestingly, a recent paper this year does suggest that microtubules display quantum effects, specifically one called superradiance. Whether this paves the way for Penrose's theory being correct is still far from clear. Physicists say that each other are off their rockers all the time. **1:04** · This is not exactly, you know, you don't need to win the Nobel Prize to be told that you're full of shit or off your rocker, okay? It's just more noticeable when you've won the Nobel Prize. But, you know, there's a lot of ideas about collapse of the wave function, etc., out there. And the fact that you've heard of Penrose's versus many of them is because he's been so successful other times. And look, that's not entirely irrational. If someone is really, really brilliant, it will occasionally happen that they say things that to you seem crazy. **1:35** · But you should have an attitude, well, like, they've been right before, so I'm going to at least pay some attention to what they're saying here. I think that's perfectly valid. That doesn't mean you have to believe it, but you can pay some attention to it. How do we distinguish genuine but unconventional ideas from pseudoscientific ones in such a way that we don't alienate the people who want to come into physics, who are genuinely interested in physics? Honestly, I'm not that interested in demarcating science from pseudoscience. **2:07** · I think that a lot of times there's bad science, which some people who don't like it want to discredit by labeling it as pseudoscience. You know, I'm perfectly happy to say that intelligent design is science. It's just crappy science. I don't have to pay any attention to it. It's, like, obviously wrong. **2:29** · So I don't need to, like, bend over backwards to invent philosophical ways of arguing that it's illegitimate. I just think it's bad. Uh-huh. What would be another example of something bad but is science? Flat Earth theory. Very, very bad. All right. So there's this guy named Terrence Howard, and I'm sure you've maybe seen clips, maybe you've read about it. What are your views on that whole situation and how it blew up? You know, look, I don't have a lot of... I don't care that much. He has zero of interest to say to any working physicist. He has some crazy ideas. **3:03** · Again, I get these crazy ideas in my email box every day. He gets noticed because he's a famous actor. He's good at something else, right? It's a way more extreme version of Roger Penrose getting noticed for his theories of consciousness and quantum mechanics. But life is short. I don't have time to worry about people off the street with crazy ideas about fundamental physics. **3:31** · One of the ways I see that situation is that we tell people, kids in particular, high school kids, even undergrads, like, you can be a scientist. You can contribute to math. Anyone can be a physicist. **3:42** · And remember, Feynman said that true science is about being irreverent to authority. You challenge ideas. We like to be proven wrong. That's what makes science great. And that there are no foolish remarks. And then someone comes on the scene like a Terrence Howard who's clearly interested in physics and chemistry and math and has his own ideas. And then we say, well, it turns out there are asinine comments you can make and not everyone can be a physicist. Do you see a tension? Yeah, I think that Richard Feynman was not a very good philosopher. He was a very good physicist. **4:08** · But I would, you know, it's very, very hard to be right about this because his remarks there absolutely do capture something true. But they're just a little bit overly simplistic. You know, if you're a good scientist, you can't be wedded to the conventional wisdom. You can't be beholden to what everyone else thinks is true. And indeed, as any working scientist knows, the way to become super successful is to figure out why the conventional wisdom is wrong, right? **4:40** · You don't become a famous scientist by proving Einstein right. You become a famous scientist by proving him wrong by doing better than Einstein. But that's really hard to do. That's the thing that people don't get told. It's easy to be irreverent. It's easy to be unconventional and individualistic and have your own ideas. It's really, really hard to do it well. **5:00** · I wrote a blog post a long time ago called Being a Heretic is Hard Work, explaining how- I'll put that on screen and then in the description as well for people to- Yeah, I don't even know what's in it because I wrote it so long ago. Maybe it's embarrassing now. But the idea was when I was an undergrad, I was, you know, very invested in the idea of overturning Einstein. And I even worked on, you know, with some professors at my institution who had data that they thought maybe was evidence against Einstein. I thought this was very, very exciting and so forth. **5:32** · But I didn't understand general relativity. I didn't really understand the astrophysical data and all of its limitations, etc. And so to be a respected, respectable, useful, productive heretic is enormously harder and a little bit less exciting than the movies would have you believe. And there's one other factor, I think, that is also super duper important here. I don't care who you are. I don't care whether you're an actor or a person on the street or a PhD in physics. **6:03** · That is entirely irrelevant. But I do care how much work you've done, put into thinking and learning about physics as it is understood. You're asking me to put aside time in my life to read your theory and pay attention to it. Well, first, read my theory and pay attention to it. My theory is called the Standard Model of Particle Physics. **6:32** · And if you're not at the level where you've understood the reasons why that theory is so good, then look, maybe you have a brilliant idea, but probably not. And so I'm going to spend my time elsewhere. Just a tiny bit. any bit of pushback. In the case of reading the Standard Model, would you say that Eric Weinstein and Peter Woit and Lee Smolin, that they have read the Standard Model and Garrett Lisi and they understand it and they can even... So Lee Smolin certainly does not belong in that list of people. **7:02** · He is a very respected, very accomplished physicist who has some very non-conventional ideas. And that's great, just like Roger Penrose, just like many people do. The others are more amateurs. They're not, you know, people who've written a lot of physics papers, people who've demonstrated that they've contributed to the field in useful ways. As I said, that's fine. I don't care who you are or whatever. But I think that, you know, I don't care about these individual people, right? What I care about is, do you build on or account for the reasons why we think the way we do already? **7:34** · It's, you know, here's a tip for reading papers that make outlandish claims in physics or in anything else. **7:49** · An outlandish claim is outlandish because the conventional wisdom doesn't accept it right away, right? It doesn't fit in. So again, the conventional wisdom is never going to be 100% correct, but there are reasons why it's the conventional wisdom. And it's not just because Ed Witten tells you that it's conventional wisdom. It's because there are good intellectual reasons. **8:10** · So if you're going to tell me the conventional wisdom is wildly wrong in some way, that's 100% good and fine. And wonderful. But start your paper with the following phrase. We understand that you might not believe this theory for the following reasons. And now we're going to tell you why those reasons don't apply to our theory, right? Show me that you've understood why I will be skeptical and my skepticism will be much easier to overcome. I don't mean to harp, but in Peter Woit's case, just to be particular, what would he say is wrong about the conventional wisdom? **8:45** · I don't know. I don't think he's making that claim. I'm not familiar. I don't, like I said, I don't read his stuff. So part of earlier when I talked about the crisis in physics, I mentioned there's the great stagnation, the great schism, and then the great silence. So the great silence is that it's difficult to have a conversation like this, but inside academia. Now you may say, hey, behind closed doors, but I'm on, I'm unaware of any conference that's dedicated to questioning the fund, the direction of fundamental physics itself. **9:17** · And even when talking about, look, we don't have the time to read other people's ideas. I, there, David Gross was speaking to Carlo Rovelli about, well, about loop quantum gravity versus string theory. And David was saying something about loop quantum gravity has a problem with matter, with fermions. And Carlo Rovelli was like, what are you talking about? We solved that at least a decade or two ago. And David Gross is like, oh, that's news to me. And I'm, I'm there watching. **9:49** · Many other people are watching thinking you don't have many competitors. Like string theory is 50% of the people in fundamental physics. **10:00** · You don't have many competitors. It's loop quantum gravity, maybe some asymptotic safe gravity, maybe some causal dynamical triangulations, but there's not much. And so you should be aware of the latest developments of your, of your competitors. So I, I don't know if it, yeah. Anyway, that that's, what do you say to that, sir? **10:23** · Well I think what I said before in a similar way, I don't think that David Gross has any responsibility for being up to date in the latest developments in competitors to string theory. I think the field has a responsibility to take those developments seriously. But an individual 80 year old Nobel prize winning physicist has earned the right to think about the ideas that he thinks are the most promising. And there's, again, very good reasons for him to believe that loop quantum gravity is not promising. I think that nevertheless, despite those reasons, it's good that as a field, we give some resources to loop quantum gravity. **10:57** · And what you have to understand is that the whole field is in constant conversation about these things. And much of the conversation does happen behind closed doors, not because it's super secret, but because, you know, you have a faculty meeting. And at the faculty meeting in your physics department, the theoretical physics group comes up and says, we would like to hire another string theorist. **11:28** · And the audience they're pitching to is not a bunch of string theorists, right? It's a bunch of condensed matter physicists and astrophysicists and atomic physicists. They have to make the case that a string theorist is what should be hired. They have to offer some reason. And likewise, someone who says, well no, we should hire a loop quantum gravity theorist. They have to give some reason. They have to, what is the result? What is the breakthrough that you've made in loop quantum gravity? You know, if you do, you will have a much higher chance of succeeding in convincing people to hire people like you. Like I said, there's not enough support for the more quirky minority perspectives, but it's not zero because there isn't a top-down hierarchy. **12:03** · There's always the chance for you to make your case. So even if the system is not perfect, the system does allow you to try to convince other people that what you're doing is promising in some way. So earlier we talked about how do we practically speaking divvy up the funds or if that's even the correct approach to minority approaches, at least currently minority approaches. And then the answer was, well, we don't know because neither of us are popes. **12:36** · And are there discussions that you're aware of in physics thinking about this, but in a public way, not just behind closed doors? Sure. I mean, look, I've been to plenty of conferences where people have panel discussions on, you know, the crisis in physics or the state of string theory or the future of physics in various ways. I mean, you can literally like Google the future of physics conference and there's plenty of those. They're not the most relevant conversations. I think those faculty meetings are more relevant. **13:10** · I think that funding agencies have meetings. How much money are you going to allocate to these different things? And empirically, different approaches to physics do die off. You know, in the 60s, there was a big boom in S-matrix theory and it was sort of an alternative to quantum field theory, but it didn't pay out. And quantum field theory did. And so quantum field theory won and people stopped doing S-matrix theory and people stopped giving funding to S-matrix theorists. **13:37** · That, of course, was in the heyday where you had all this wonderful experimental data guiding you as to which approaches worked and which ones didn't. And today we're not that lucky. So, you know, I think that, like I said, I'm not, my focus is not in fixing the academic system. **14:00** · I don't think the academic system is perfect in any way, but I'm much more interested in understanding the universe. It's useful to have a summary of the situation thus far. After speaking with people like Neil Turok of the University of Edinburgh, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute, Gregory Chaitin of the Institute for Advanced Studies, among others, who all believe there is a crisis in fundamental physics, I've identified their claim down to three elements. Number one, the Great Stagnation. So this is the claim that since the 1980s there haven't been experimentally verified theoretical innovations in fundamental physics. **14:34** · Now this is a different claim than quote-unquote physics is in crisis. It's a specific claim. Indeed, you can do this exercise yourself. For fun, last week I went through every single Nobel Prize in physics since the 1980s and asked myself whether the award is being given for work based on a theory fomented after the 1980s or if this was just confirmation of a theory cemented prior to the 1980s. How many instances do you think there were? Zero. Number two is the Great Schism. **15:05** · This refers to the split that occurred in the physics community, particularly in the 1990s. Superstring theory emerged as a dominant paradigm, with some proponents claiming it's the only game in town, quote-unquote. This led to a divide between string theorists and those pursuing alternative approaches. The schism is not just about scientific disagreement, it's about academic positions and general direction. How should one allocate resources between different research programs in a data-starved field? **15:40** · And number three, the Great Silence. This refers to the difficulty in having an open, constructive dialogue about the state of fundamental physics in academia. There's a perceived trial by string theorists, where new ideas are evaluated primarily by them. A string theorist may say that criticisms without offering an alternative is not useful. Put up or shut up. **16:30** · They're not being listened to, and they're misrepresented. For instance, string theorists claim that alternative theorists are resentful because the string theorists aren't working on their theories. However, the people that I speak to, both on-air, and there are links in the description, and off-air, suggest that the issue is more that string theorists won't listen to their theories. And that's a different claim. It's a claim of silence. **16:51** · The question becomes, if there is no global authority in physics to mandate change like a pope, and simultaneously that dominant paradigms like string theory persist due to self-reinforcing mechanisms, then at what point does it indeed become the moral onus of individual researchers, like a David Gross, for instance, to stay informed about competing theories? **17:18** · Just as peer review is seen as an obligation to give back to the field, what about staying aware of alternative developments as a duty to keep the field healthy? Now, the Great Stagnation may be changing. As there's now evidence, such as the Muon G2 anomaly, and also DESI's new data on dark energy, you can read The Economist's article called The Dominant Model of the Universe is Creaking, which discusses these developments. **17:51** · If you enjoyed this TOE-clipping, then the full video is linked in the description. You should also sign up for TOEmail, which is again in the description and the pinned comment. You'll receive immediate access to all exclusive updates from the Theories of Everything podcast. It also helps me communicate directly with the core TOE community. You'll also receive my Top 10 TOEs. Think of it as the intellectual version of Quentin Tarantino's obsession.