Peter Voit and Edward Frenkel on Unification in Physics and Mathematics

He gives a bird's-eye view of theoretical physics development over the past fifty years and shows how much of it turned out to be dead-ends. I think that's because people are still thinking about reduction as something that actually happens in the physical world, rather than as a set of relations between (mostly mathematical) languages. Then the second part is a story about how he ran into problems with modeling fermions in lattice gauge theories and how that lead to another "but we don't see that side of the duality", except this time it is something that appears just in the mathematical language used to describe spinors:

See Martin Roelphs on Projective Geometric Algebra.

See Peter Voit's blog at https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

See my comment, referring to the discussion with Neil Turok on Lambda CDM:

30:20 Maybe these super-partners only existed before the Lambda CDM big bang? https://youtu.be/-gwhqmPqRl4?si=GklKejH7XCcWeRvo&t=48m56s

Here's Edward Frenkel talking about unification in mathematics, and explaining how string theory has been more successful in mathematics than it has been as physics:


To me it just sounds like these mathematicians and physicists are all just overpaid to do stuff that nobody except themselves could ever really understand! See The Math Sorceror on Topology by Munkres and the talk by Ravi Vakil in Amanda Gefter and Curt Jaimungal Talk Physics and Philosophy.

He asks people to put questions in the comments for a subsequent talk:

1:57:09 That question about reformulating problems in harmonic analysis in number theory is very Pythagorean. All the world is number, and so is music. But is the shortest route really to do three PhDs? Who can afford to do that?

This whole thing ought to interest David Broadhurst, but he probably knows it all already. See Dynkin Diagrams and Numberphile - Sophie Maclean on the Catalan Numbers which is about easy ways to prove cyclical series of reductions using a graph-theoretic idea called dominator cycles.

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Edward Frenkel at Cannes in 2022 talking about his book Love and Math, Kubrick's 2001 and Nietsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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Then I picked up the biography of Henri Poincaré I'm reading and this is what was on the next page:



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