In between replies and tweets devoted to weightlifting, weed and women, the author has some very detailed and mostly scornful commentary on the state of the field and the behavior of its leaders. In any case, I urge you to watch the entire podcast, it’s well worth the time.įor a very different perspective on the responsibility of senior people for string theory’s problems, you might want to take a look at the bizarre twitter feed of stringking42069, which may or may not be some very high-quality trolling. As part of this, he acknowledges his own role in the past, in which he was often happy to get some reflected glory from string theory hype by playing up its positive influence on parts of mathematics while ignoring its failure as a theory of the real world. He pins responsibility for this situation on senior leaders of the field, who have been unwilling to admit failure. It’s pretty clear that his reaction to what he saw going on at the conference was colored by his experience growing up in late Soviet-era Russia, where the failure of the system had become clear to everyone, but you weren’t supposed to say anything about this. The experience opened his eyes to just how bad some of the long-standing problems with string theory have gotten, and starting around here in the podcast he has a lot to say about them. In particular, one thing that happened to Frenkel since last spring is that he attended Strings 2023 and gave a talk there (slides here, video here). While there’s some overlap between the two podcasts, some different topics are covered in the new one. While both of these are long, they’re very much worth watching. A few months ago I wrote about a Lex Fridman podcast with Frenkel here. It includes some discussion of the ideas behind the new paper.Ĭurt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything podcast has a new episode featuring a long talk with Edward Frenkel (by the way, I’ll be doing one of these next month). This past weekend I recorded a podcast with Curt Jaimungal, which presumably will at some point appear on his Theories of Everything site. One goal of this paper is to answer that question. In the ideas about unification using QFT formulated in Euclidean twistor space that I’ve been working on the past few years, it was always unclear why, when you analytically continued back to Minkowski signature, the left-handed Euclidean spin symmetry would not go to the Lorentz boost symmetry, but to an internal symmetry. It’s quite remarkable that the dynamics of gauge fields and of GR also has a chiral-asymmetric formulation. The argument of this paper is that the relation between Euclidean and Minkowski is not the usual chirally-symmetric analytic continuation but something where both sides use just one chirality (“right-handed”). In particular, it has always been a mystery why a Weyl spinor field has a simple description in Minkowski spacetime, but no such description in Euclidean spacetime, where the Euclidean version of Lorentz symmetry seems to require introducing fields of opposite chirality. One motivation for this is the problem of how to Wick rotate spinor fields, given that Minkowski and Euclidean spacetime spinors are quite different. I’ve finally managed to write up something short about an idea I’ve been working on for the last few months, so now have a preliminary draft version of a paper tentatively entitled Spacetime is Right-handed.
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