Morning & Afternoon Discussions

0:00 A little bit about what you were saying to Colin yesterday at lunchtime, or just after lunch, about the richness of the category of the reflexive graphs. And even though it's so simple as such, it already contains so many examples that illustrate the failure of conditions that hold in abstract sets and that illustrate the idea of measured by an intensive extension of quantum. No, it's just splendid terminology. It's just what I call a rerun, in fact. That was just, I was struggling to listen, unfortunately. Good morning. John, good morning. Sorry about that, by the way. Reminds me of the famous incident with Churchill and Roosevelt, the first time he went to Washington. Well, no, he was... He was taking a step out of his bath, stopped naked, and Roosevelt came into the room in his wheelchair, and being in a wheelchair was a little difficult, so he just turned around and pulled out. Churchill just kind of removed the loofer, which was strategically placed, and said, A Prime Minister of Great Britain shall have no secrets from the President of the United States. He will now observe the excellence of our equipment. I made that bit up. Of course I made that bit up. It's the sort of thing he would have said. But the rest of it is true. Didn't get this on Lendlease, you know. No, no, making that bit up.

2:30 I was just asking a little bit about the topic that you were discussing at lunchtime yesterday about the toposomal reflexive graphs. Much is already illustrated in this one. In a relatively short case. I was thinking there should even be a kind of combinatorial version of O-minimality in the sense that so many of the different models, the crucial sets, the cubical sets, they all have reflexive graphs, so they're all O-minimal in the sense that there's little ordering. You restrict these complicated theories to dimension one, you always get the same. I don't know if cubical sets in this context are still edges and faces except that they're cubes instead of triangles. Is that categorically one of the differences? I don't know. You were saying it works out differently. No, I mean this is one of the things that homotopy theory is the same. It's one of those that's just known, of course. I know a lot of special properties of some special sets that I think are implicitly used by the students.

5:00 I ask experts on homotopy theories, why do you just use simplistic sets, why don't you use typical sets? They always say, well, if you just do more calculations yourself, you'd have a mystical revelation that you'd know, instead of mathematical properties. That's why this topos behaves a little differently than the other one, they just, you know, so actually they don't know. Many of these elementary properties that I worked out, they don't even know them, even though they're probably playing a role in the calculations. I think there's a footnote in L'Inquitante where he says he wonders if the phrase details are left will ever be replaced by the author does not understand this point. Well, yes, well, for once, good for L'Inquitante. Or in Peter Johnstone, you know, the details are not worth carrying out. The lecture is advised not to carry out a lecture to me, otherwise it might reveal the ignorance of me to being unkind, but it does add up because it's sort of a phrase that gets you a point. Well, when you say unkind, I mean, you want to say to these homotopy people, there's something about your practice that you don't... Bonjour, Pierre. You're not calling them ignorant. They do have this. Right. Good morning. I found a bank coming to you. Oh, you did find it? The one at the Credit Agricole? Yes, sir. Good, okay. I'm on the corner. Yes, yes. It's interesting. I mean, there was an old man nearby and I asked about the bank. He said, I asked about Credit Agricole. Oh, no, there is Credit Rituel. He's standing right there, yes. I mean, next door, but he knew one of the banks. I suppose he was a customer of that bank. Yes, you're right, because Credit Rituel is just down the road, a little bit further, as it is. They have a distributor there as well. I was riding my bicycle in South Carolina, and I had passed a gas station, and I was a little hungry, a little thirsty, but I said, I'll keep going.

7:30 I went on and on about it. I was a very interesting man. I needed to buy the papers, buy the books. As I said, people now are very proud of the invention of T-modules, administrative algebra, which we did with differential equations. The idea is there. I mean, not only there is a symbolic method to deal with operators, and I was, I mean, I was motivated by a recurrent question. Who is the person who wrote the tale of the expansion in the exponential form? Exponential f plus h is exponential of h of d over dx applied to f. And recurrently I have a question. I'd say it's definitely somebody in the early 19th century, but I wouldn't tell you I've heard of him. And I remember someone now, he told me about Rota. Rota knew how to do it. He was a master in symbolic algebra, but nevertheless, it's a book. And it's in his book on differential equations, which is a very valuable book, still today. And at some point, I think it's very interesting, he discusses... Well, what is the symbolic method to deal, let's say, with hypergeometric equations, which is standard now, and he explains that, first of all, you can substantiate it via Laplace transform, and start the model very symbolically, produce what is a via algebra, it produces what is a via algebra. And that changes the generator, and you notice that when you change the generator, the relation changes and so on, and at some point you say, well I have two different equations, but in abstract terms of module, I modernize it, abstract terms of module over the very large amount, the isomorphic, so if I have some solution for one, and I don't, and they're important points, I don't have to write explicitly a functional transformation. The 19th century algebra is to have seen that.

10:00 I thought you had a homomorphism or an implement. Yeah. Yeah. No, but it makes a point. It makes a point. It makes a point. That's the nice thing about it. I often wondered about the education of engineers. You'll find a Laplace transform. And really, if one learns to reason on a slightly more abstract level, I guess Dirac had something to do with it. You wouldn't have to. I mean, everything could be equally well expressed in the original setting. And I was surprised to see that there is a line of thought, Bohl, Eppeside, Dirac. I didn't know, well of course I knew Eppeside, I knew Dirac, I knew Bohl, but I knew less Bohl, but I knew. But I never understood that there was a line of thought in any of these, and that Buhl inspired the Heaviside. I certainly obviously understood that the line of thought ran from Heaviside to Dirac. But I haven't realized it in Dirac. And Dirac is really the last one in the tradition. I've just had a fantasy that one can make a movie about that. Exactly what you said. We will have your side. Yes, it would be great. The Bull's wife was the daughter of Everest, the man after whom, come out in his name. Yes, after the Neeps. Oh yes, the Neeps, I didn't know. Thank you for your, as I might have expected, your encyclopedic knowledge. Mary Everest Bull, yes. She was just Bull, not Bull Everest. Oh, but I thought that was because she had taken her husband's name on marriage. No, I didn't realise that. Mary Everest. That's what I understood, but I hadn't realized that she was his niece. I thought she was the daughter of the man who supervised his mounting on behalf of the British Empire. You know that he was the chief, he was the surveyor general of India. He was the guy, the chief surveyor of the British government in India. Our colleague Seminov Tchantronsky is very proud that he is called Tchantronsky.

12:30 It's because his grand-grandfather played the Seminov in the Russian army. Really? Tchantronsky, Tchantronsky is mountain, Tchantronsky is sky, Tchantronsky is mountain, Tchantronsky is sky. Supervisory theory. And then, the emperor, I mean, the charmed emperor, Kant, or even Chansonski, right by the emperor. So, yeah, the family is proud, it's not for them, but the other is proud that they're named. Yeah, actually, I think I'd rather be named for the mountains. I think, after all, mountains last a lot longer than mountains. Mountains last a lot longer than aristocracy. Mountains last longer than the feudal order. When I visited the first time, I was never allowed in India. I was never allowed in Leningrad. I'm proud that sometime in the 70s, I applied for a visa to Moscow, which was denied to me, obviously for political reasons. And about the same time, I was summoned to the USA. I had a long interview with the consul who wanted to know more about me before handing me the visa. And it's clear that for the U.S. consular and for the Soviet embassy I was an enemy of the visa. And so that was the first time so. The system I visited. I've been in the Etihad a number of times. And when the first time I visited St. Petersburg, I was invited by my friends in the Edo. He was involved in many political activities or half-political activities on the art of science, of course. No, he struck me as a great guy. Yeah, he's a great guy. And so when I spoke to him about it, he said immediately, yes, of course, we have to discuss the details, of course, we have to discuss the operation, but I fully support the idea.

15:00 And so now every year the students spend three or four weeks in Korea, the Russian students, but it's a myth that they come one day per week at the IHS, first of all to meet their Russian elders, there are many Russians in the faculty, their Russian elders, and also to follow some special lectures. And I myself, or Lapok and myself, give special series of lectures for them. Which is of course up to all the students if they want, but it's basically for them and if some Normanians want to follow the lectures they are of course welcome. And so, and the idea of opinion when I discuss the matter of opinion occurs and which materializes. These young kids, they come in the year number N, and in the year number N plus 3, they apply and become a small dog to me. And so it's better if I know them before I can make the selection. You can select the good ones. Very, very... It's extremely good arrangement, very far-sighted. And for the institute it costs a lot. Subtitles by the Amara.org community Well actually I do have the impression that in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a tremendous depression in the level of scientific activity because so many people left for the United States, so in fact I think it's not inappropriate to speak of the revival of scientific research. The idea of the independent university is to continue the tradition. Yes, sure. I mean they, well, their reference is Chebyshev. It's interesting, Chebyshev, as I say, was actually the head of the math department at this Bowman Technical University, as I described earlier.

17:30 We have many discussions on that point. We want a combination which allows these young people to travel abroad, to be known abroad, and so, for instance, there is even a possibility to develop your thesis in Paris and Moscow at the same time. There's a possibility. Some of these students took it as an opportunity. Thank you for your attention. That may be where he got his, because this is what he'd done his PhD in. Well, he gave me all these papers, but it was pretty obvious to me that the standard of papers that, you know, really good mathematicians were doing in Pinsley Johnbury, the stuff that they were doing was very, at best, you know, more borderline in terms of its quality. And on top of that, it was pretty obvious that, you know, his papers were being written for him by somebody else. You thought they would just promote him and his own personal entourage rather than the general conversation. Exactly. That was what became apparent to me. He was just out to promote his own personal entourage for reasons connected with his business strategy, the expansion of his kind of business. He knew nothing about category theory. In fact, the first time... There's this website. It's in... It's in Omsk. Omsk. It's in Omsk. It's Omsk. It's Omsk. Well, yes. It's Omsk. Yes, yes, yes. But there's a whole series of people that... No, it's a big group. They've been all working on different aspects of how topos... That's right. Well, the short answer to your question is that there's nothing. There seems to be nothing, whatever. There's links to my home page and links to here and there. And this is all...

20:00 Yes, Igor Aksharov. I never met him. He'd read some curious stuff. I read it in London, Ontario, actually. Oh, you mean, there was a meeting, wasn't there, in 1975? Oh, yes, 1975. How long before? 25 years. What kind of salary would it take to make it worthwhile for a Russian to stay in Russia? It used to be that if you could send a Russian $400 a month, he was set. What would it take now to... More than that. A lot more than that, but not... Still a huge differential. It's a very long... Still a very long... But I could not give an exact figure. But it is still substantially less than... Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The differential is still huge. I know that we give... We give fellowship... We give fellowship to some of the independent universities and by all... The Western Standard is followed by a ridiculously low, but they are so happy to happen. That, of course, was what was obvious to me once I met this group of these 20 mathematicians that Pavlov maintains, that they were just basically in such a desperate position that they, well, as you said, they had to take support wherever they could get it. Including from this guy whose agenda I haven't been able to figure out yet, but he founded this big software company and also controls this group of companies that specialize in the production of industrial glass. Laminates and ceramics and in glasses that are used in specialist processes, including aircraft windshields and things like that, which sounds a very specialized business, but I was told not by him, but by his business kind of minders and the kind of big guys with the heavy shoulders that drove me around in the car. ...that he was worth about 200 million dollars, which makes him a very small player by comparison, in terms of the Russian elite, but on the other hand, you know, a lot more money than anybody in terms of the size of my pond, a mighty, mighty, mighty big fish indeed. So if he was willing to provide some money seriously for the support of meetings like this in the West, obviously it was worth my going to Moscow to meet him. But having met him and having heard his plagiarized paper, I realized that... Is this all a fantasy or did this material back in the... Which, what, the... Factories in the... Oh yes, no, those things, well... Well, put it this way, I googled on Antares and found a description of their software business and their website and the industrial glass, and that exists as far as I have been able to determine.

22:30 He doesn't decontrol this group of companies. Yes, it's a very small player by comparison with the big Russian plutocrat business elite. He's a tiny fish by their standards. I mean, you're talking, obviously, billions, or even tens, many tens of billions in the case of those people. You're just talking a few hundred million dollars with this guy, so he's a small player. But the interesting thing is that he has this, I guess, obsessional interest, but that he does divert a certain amount of his money to supporting this research group of about 20 mathematicians in Moscow of very uneven quality. But there was one guy there who was a young algebraic topologist. So I was told he was doing very good work indeed, and who wouldn't be able to survive if he wasn't supported by this power bloc. And also he gives a lot of money to this Balmer Technical University. It would really be good if he got something along the lines of the perimeter, isn't it? That seems to be exactly the sort of thing that he was looking to create. I can't remember his name. Do you remember his name? The man who's put a hundred million dollars in... It's Greek. That's right, it is a Greek name. Yeah, I know the guy you mean. That's a classy operation. No, no, no, no. The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo in Canada, where they do research mainly on quantum gravity. They put a hundred million dollars into it. It's a very classy operation. Oh, yes. Well, they do have some very, very impressive people there. I was trying to remember the director's name. I can't remember it. He was at this meeting with Chris Isham. In fact, he was there when I met this man Pavlov. What is his name? Oh, Nick Smolin is the director. No, no. Oh, is he actually the director? Yes, yes. Oh, I thought he was the head of the... He's the head of the scientific... No, no, no, the guy, I forget his name. Yes, they call him the administrator. The guy who actually does the day-to-day running of the place, who's responsible for his administration, is not a mathematician. He's an administrator. His name is... his very common name is something like... Smith or Smithson, I'm trying to think. But no, you're absolutely right. Lee Smolin is the head of the... Cut to the chase. What you're talking about here is the production of the opium for the masses of intelligentsia. Well, that's what I designed. That's what I... So if these two are coming together, I mean, this shows really that it's... Well, no.

25:00 Medici said that the money he ever spent was the financing of the Platonic Institute. So, about million dollars, I remember some years ago I was used to say that a man who can dispense a million dollars is an important man in the world, until I met the mayor of my small town, 6,000 years on the other side of the bridge, who said, well, my friend, I mean, I can sign for a million dollars. Well, of course, I have to report to the council, but I can sign for one million dollars. And then I met... How could he? Like Harvey Friedman, that's my friend. Exactly, yeah, exactly. From Philadelphia, Gesternaber, I met Gesternaber, and he said, well, my son is in the World Bank, he signed for a billion dollars! Not a million dollars, but a million dollars! His signature is worth a billion dollars! I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's a different scale! If a man from a small town on the side of the river can sign a bill of one million dollars, I mean the sort of bike he can sign for a million dollars, that's a different scale. But of course you're right, and I should have realized at the time I met the guy. I'm not sure it would be uneven quality. Well, I guess I naively thought that he might be somebody like this man who supports the Barometer Institute, which I think is assigned entirely scientifically serious. Oh yeah, I think you should. I'm prepared to be enlightened, Bill. I'm always prepared to be enlightened by you. I mean, it's a sort of glamour project. Quantum gravity was something evidently... I think he did, he studied, started as a physicist and then made all this money and... Computer, what is it? Some computer. Yes, it's similar to this Pavlov character, except he's not as serious. I mean, it's like something out of science fiction, frankly. The institute itself is very much... You think the quantum gravity program is something out of science fiction. It's like a science fiction movie, you know. As a whole thing, as a whole, I can't say, but certainly any of the institutes. We've left us small and right in the way of explaining the purpose of this institute. He wrote also for the Scientific American. Yeah, he writes a lot of, you know, popular expositions. Have you read that? No, I've not read that one. Well, I have. I must have...

27:30 Yeah, I was quite impressed. It seemed to me to be pretty... Well, I know... Do you know... Admittedly, he's rather big on end. She was a member there now. Simon Saunders has been there quite often. Well, he's there now. No, he's actually in Paris at the moment. No, no, I know, but I saw him three weeks ago. He was in Paris in the spring and he's back here again now, but he was at the perimeter in between, and Chris Isham has been there. Well, we could discuss another time, but I'm interested, very interested in what you say. You think it's basically scientifically suspect, but this guy Pavlov was definitely scientifically suspect. On the other hand, the people... I still haven't figured out what their agenda is. I don't mean the Perimeter, I mean these people in Boston, because he seemed to be... In the case of Perimeter, they publish papers, they have huge numbers of visitors. It's sort of clearing for people coming from university of physics. And the papers they publish there, a lot of them get stuck on RQ, you know that web, and then they get published in journals, it just, it just, I don't know, they obviously have a considerable spectrum of people who visit there, right, from really solid physicists, right, probably to, you know, shading off into all kinds of strange... Yeah, sure. But in all fairness, Bill, I mean, I have read a number of the papers that were published by the people at the Perimeter Institute, and it seems to me that some of them are of very high quality. Probably, yeah. Some of them are very high quality. Some of them are not at all. Well, it's obviously much better to have uneven quality. Better than nothing at all. In terms of maintaining some kind of... Well, it's not even... The quality is very uneven on the archive. Yes, I see your point. If you look at the papers in this archive thing, you know the quality is obviously very good. You have really good stuff on one end and rubbish at the other, I'm afraid. But you do have some very good stuff. Just to answer your question about the topostheroids in Omsk. No, the first time this man Pavlov had ever heard the words topostheroids were from my lips. He had never heard, because my first, no, he never heard it, so he said, what is topos theory? I attempted, God help me, I'm just glad you weren't there to hear it, but I attempted an exposition, and there was actually a guy, this young algebraic topologist, who's not a category theorist, but who does know, obviously, can't possibly do algebraic topology without knowing a great deal of category theory, who came up to me afterwards. He had a German, German, that was his name, German.

30:00 And was very nice. He's a young guy. He's only about 26, 25, 26. He said, you know, you know, for a non-mathematician, that's a very good, very good explanation of topos theory. I was very, very pleased about that. He actually acted as the translator when later this guy Pavlov took me out to dinner to meet some of his... ...business cronies and this young guy German, Anatoly German, came along and he was, he's the guy who's supposed to be the crash on algebraic topologist, but he said to me on the way, because we went together in the tube on the subway to meet these people, because they were already at some restaurant and couldn't get across Moscow because the traffic was so bad, and I asked him obviously, you know, just pumping him for as much information about Pavlov, because I was already becoming a bit suspicious of Pavlov by then anyway. And he said, yeah, you know, by the standards of the business elite, the mafia here, you know, he's clean and he's very small fry. I mean, he's not a major league player, but he is close to the people in... I can never think of the guy's name, the mayor of Moscow, Lubachov, I think. Yeah, well, I mean, he's in business. He's in business, because I know he's producing glass, and, you know, the construction... And he'd be in business. Yeah, and the con... He'd get along with it. Exactly, and he wouldn't be, and the construction industry is the big source of the boom in Moscow, so they'll basically... We've got a puppy back. Yeah, he does put a lot of... Guy bought a dog for us, nice guy, we go there, we have a nice meal, play with the nice dogs. This guy's in construction, he understands. Now... I know that you just couldn't be in construction in Youngstown if everybody who worked for you was a nice guy. No, too true. Or that you worked for. I don't know what this guy has ever done personally, but I know he couldn't be in construction in Youngstown. Unless he knew people who would break your legs and would shoot your kneecaps off if you'd been their way. Or worse things than that. Exactly. Well, I'm assuming that's probably true of Pavlov as well, but at any rate, The line that this young man, Anatoly Gaumont, was coming out to me was a little bit like what you were saying in your conversation with Mrs. Baines. Look, you know, you just don't appreciate how desperate it is for somebody, you know, doing research, a young research mathematician. The salaries are paid, you know, two years in arrears. If we're lucky, I mean, we're literally having to, you know, to beg for coppers in the streets.

32:30 My department, who have had to work as prostitutes, this guy is giving us just enough to make the difference between ...being able to eat and not being able to eat. And by the standards of the people who run the place now, he's clean and he's genuinely interested in the math. Okay, so he wants it for his own kudos, and I'm sure it's got some place in his business design, but we'd much rather take his support than almost anything else that's on offer. At the very least, he finds himself the most reputable kind of decorative prestige. That's essentially what it is. I find this is sort of irony, though. I mean, really, 30 years ago, we fought all those battles against military funding of the logic. Remember, back in 1970, why didn't we have an old German? It's a strange turn of events, you know, to me. But there it is, right? Well, as I say, I mean, I'm not apologizing. No, no, no, I didn't mean anything. No, no, no. But I just want to try to explain to Bill, when this guy approached me at Imperial, in the context of a birthday meeting for Chris Isham, who I do respect as a very seriously respected, absolutely outstanding scientist and mathematical physicist, and, you know, He told me this story, and he said, come to Moscow. I hadn't been to Moscow since 1980, it was only the second time I'd been there. I obviously very much wanted to go because I wanted to see with my own eyes the changes in Russia and what had been happening there. And to meet this group of Russian mathematicians that he told me he would introduce me to. And, you know, I wasn't entering into any kind of commitment to him by doing so, other than by kind of returning the invitation if he wanted to come here. I did, and I decided his motives are. Well, exactly as you analyze them. So, you know, I told him, you know, it was pretty obvious he wasn't going to suddenly write a check to establish some foundation in the West anyway. Yeah, he was fishing for something. He was fishing to see what my contacts really were and, you know, whether I could put him in touch with anybody that he'd really be seriously interested. He asked lots and lots of questions about Penrose. That was almost his main topic of conversation when he was with me. You know, how well do you know the people around Roger Penrose? How well do you know them? He listed, he was obviously quite well informed, he listed about...

35:00 Six toposphasics of things, or six twistor theories, at Oxford, two of whom, Leigh Houston, that I do know quite well. Could you arrange for Penrose to come to our conference? No, I've only ever met Penrose twice in my life. He wouldn't know me from Adam. If you want to invite Penrose to your conference, just send him a letter of invitation. Probably won't answer it, but if I offered him $10,000, would he come? Find out for yourself, you know, this was when he got here. That was the point at which I realized that this guy was a serious, you know, serious. The Russians I've known are not dealing with a lot of money, but they're perfectly active connections, prestige connections, everything. Exactly, that makes sense. You and I discovered the same thing. At least I got two, I got a week in Moscow out of it, which was a very interesting experience. Do you feel that there's more content to the program that's supporting some of these kinds of research? Some of them. Some of them. Yeah. Yeah, so it's not just... It's very hard to make a judgment about that particular one, but there's clearly a trend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't detect anything, you know, kind of semi-mystical or religious agenda with this guy, as he seemed to have no religious convictions at all. He and his wife and the kids seemed to be well-adjusted. They didn't go to church or anything. In fact, he actually told me at one point... I've been... I had some similar experiences and actually... And these could go on for quite a while. Before you. Before the actual agenda. Before the mask. Emerges. Yes. Before the mask slips. A little bit, then you suddenly realize, oh, this guy doesn't understand a thing I'm saying. He's got something else in mind, and he's pursuing it quite consistently. Well, it was when he started pumping me, it was when he started pumping me about Penrose, and that was when he got, that was when he came here, that started pumping me about Penrose, and then came out, that was when, if you like, the mask slipped completely, and I kind of saw what was underneath, when he said, if I offered him $10,000, would he come to my conference?

37:30 Slips, slips, mask slips completely. There was this guy in the lodge who was pursuing me. That was when the mask slipped completely. How much do you want? And I think in fairness to Penrose, they get the same answer from him. It's a fascinating thing there. Either he has another reason to come, or you're going to have to talk $50,000 if he might. Yeah, I always think so too. Why don't you try Hawking? Start at a million. You have to pay for his jet to bring him. Yeah, of course. And you have to pay for his wife's jet to bring his wife, the new one. The difference between now and 30 years ago, I mean, because here these guys, these private patrons may have all kinds of motives. In the case of the military, it was just one. Essentially just one, the military funding. The military industrial complex. Right, it was quite monolithic. In the summer, I mean, there was a forest fire, and the local people were exhausted, and they called a volunteer to help them. And I volunteered to go to the fireman. And what I discovered is that when we work with people, good people will do their job, I mean, especially their sons, who do their job as sons of the poor. ...about the honest policeman who starts off...

47:30 I can say that the subject is such that professional philosophers are often struck by debating answers, but they end up deriding personalities. But about Soviet leaders, I remember 1965, and Lenin, who at the time was rector of the University of Lenin, now vice president of the Academy of Sciences, and a very good mathematician, knew a lot about that.

50:00 I went to Cambridge and took notes on Hoyle's lectures when I was 16.

52:30 But I have these wonderful notes, superb, you see. And Hoyle was very impressive because he never, he never completely, he never really abandoned the steady state theory. I mean, he just didn't like the idea of an origin. And it's been rehabilitated by people like Linde, haven't they? Oh, no, I know, I know. It's escape into infinity, you see. The escape into the infinite past in one way or another. And Linde, you know, the idea that you could flip the origin off and the universe in some sense always was here. In some sense. I mean, of course. But it was, the Catholics loved, of course, the Eye of the Orphan because they always maintained it and all of that stuff. And it's very interesting how, I don't know, I mean, when, I can't remember their names, we discovered the 3 degrees K background. You know, I mean, it just opened up again, as Einstein said. Actually, the reason Einstein, of course, mentioned it, you know, didn't care for the dynamic solutions of his equations was because he said that if we have a dynamic, it opens up bottomless speculations again. And what he meant, of course, was the idea of the origin. And the girl says you can have your cake and eat it. Exactly. Well, of course, that idea is Hawking, who has this very obscure... You know, that he attempted to popularize in the imaginary time, but which is again a kind of escape into infinity, the way he introduces, you know, a cyclicity into the arrangement in some sense. He doesn't really believe it, apparently, of course. Well, it's a formative, because he doesn't like the idea of a Big Bang, either. Did he, Gamow? Yes, yes, Gamow. He did, but Gamow was an atheist. Very strong atheists.

55:00 But Galvin Potem was the first to make a prediction about the back half. Yes, he was. Long before it was observed by Einstein in the 60s. Well, you know his paper. You know the alphabets. The alphabets. They have to go up out there. It's better to get alpha, beta, and gamma on the books, right isn't it? Yes, I saw that. Oh, I teased on 1, 2, 3, infinity. I loved that book. When I was a kid. Oh, I don't think it's poor. I think it's great. You know, you spend a long time getting over it, admittedly. I don't know though. I don't see it. I love the drawings. You learned about Hilbert sometime. It was very fun reading for a kid. About the Big Bang, I mean, I made some calculations about that and I tried to have some consequences as a cross model. The model is that the universe is really two sheets separated by very, very small distance. And that the distance may be sizable and subordinate and completely infinitesimal. You've eliminated the big pack, is that correct? Yes, well, it's a very interesting deed that you've said. It's a continuation which would allow you to show... Closing in.

57:30 Terrible idea. Impressive. Yeah. Mathematical physicist. But the way... He was interested... Afterwards, he gave a private explanation to an audience of about six people, which I was allowed to kind of sit in on and report. And then he actually gave an account of some of the discussions he had with Penrose... Sorry, with Hawking. Hawking appeared at one of his starts, his present PhD student gave one of the main talks. The book was saying that he spent about his calculation of the imaginary time part of it. Anyway, I just did it. I was just playing around with a few mathematical tricks. But, you know, if you talked about imaginary time, it was going to sell for. Yeah, yeah. He didn't quite. Even so, that was pretty well to say. Even so, I mean, there was some, surely some effort to avoid. He's kind to me, you know. He was a student of Hoyle, wasn't he? He was a student of Hoyle in Cambridge. I think he probably was. Who? Hawking. No. We'll see you next time. But he had this... It was the real effort to escape, I think, the... Look, he had a... He was running with Hoyle because Hoyle... Hoyle gave a talk at the Royal Society. This is where Hawking first... Well, there's a... Hoyle gave a talk at the Royal Society. Some calculation that he had... ...results used to verify this, and Hawking sort of hiked up and went, I have. I did it last night. It's wrong.

1:00:00 There were other difficulties, of course, in the steady-state theory. We know there were difficulties. I mean, Hoyle admitted there were difficulties in it, but fundamentally he thought something like that view had to be, again, it's somehow an escape into infinity. You're simply confronted with one universe and a finite time of origin. You are inevitably going to be confronted with the problem of origin. Now, there's a very simple answer to that, which is an old religious explanation. And it's been there a long time, apparently. Well, you know, if you look at Newton, he's very interesting on this. Newton, and I don't know, what was the later corresponding thing? He had problems, of course, where they had a finite universe. But he was happy to put God's, you know, Newton's universe, final point, had an infinite past. Yes, it had an infinite past. And so the point, the origin, although Newton, of course, had this, certainly believed in God. But he manages to have the idea of an infinite God without the problem of an origin. And escaping the problem of an origin is a serious underlying, it still is, a very serious underlying element. I think motivation and cosmology. That was absolutely apparent from listening to Turok's talk. Yes, it's a serious thing. I mean, it's still a major, I mean, it's not only, because physically you find all kinds of different ways of dealing with it. For example, oh, you know, with Lindis, you know, with the bubble universe and so on, and the idea that there are many. To overcome the argument from design, all you have to do is assume there are infinitely many problems. And we're only living in, you know, like the frogs, we're only living in one of them. But what I mean is, I think that's a serious motivating issue in common. Well, that one takes many forms. It does indeed. I agree, I agree. Well, that's in one universe. But just that philosophically, I mean, that's the major thing that's been... No, it's not a question of whether or not there is some idea of pure being can be obtained by congealing the notion of pure becoming.

1:02:30 A particular theory of that I call a creation myth. And the theory is, the theorem is, it is consistent. Creation myth is permanent. That is, there is no preserved and there never could be a preserved pure becoming, not a matter of different times. But still, this is a direct way of unifying finiteness and infinity. But there's a long-standing theological version of that same argument, which is that God can do more things than we can think of. And if you want the anti-theological version of it, there's more explanations that don't involve God than we've thought of yet, too. So whenever your argument is, gee, how else could you explain Jesus if you're wrong, this is always a bad argument. Yes, but then in that case, you see, there have to be some kind of advance in the way these questions are thought of, and that's, of course, exactly what happened philosophically. If you have that philosophy at that level, philosophers tried to find some way. After all, the whole history of Western philosophy has been some kind of escape from religion. But look at Descartes. I mean, you know, this split between, you know, theology and philosophy, which occurred, well, more or less with Descartes. Never occurred, you know, in many other, Chinese never had religion in quite the same way, but the contract with Islamic thinking, they never broke. I went to Islamic, I've been to a couple, the Islamic thinkers never broke, philosophers never broke with theology, and you can still see, there is no, there is no Descartes in Islamic philosophy. And so it's still... Maimonides is a Jew. He's a Jew. And he's working in the one place, you know, the court of the Caliphate. And even he, Maimonides, indeed, is also writing. But he's not... But a Jew in an Islamic world. He was a Jew in a city which was under Islamic rule, but it was an extraordinary cultural presence in which Christians, Jews, and...

1:05:00 Yes, Muslims had something pretty close to freedom of religion, freedom of expression, almost unique until one gets to the 18th century, the 18th century, and elsewhere in Europe, 17th century, anyway. So, yes, I suppose one could argue... But he made, in the guide for the perplexed, he actually writes... I analyzed, well, I was interested in his arguments against the atomists. He's still an aristotelian, but the thing is that he has an enormous amount of commentaries, of course, on the religious, he has a very, but he's not Descartes, I mean, what I mean is, there isn't any, you could say, Ibn Khaldun, there are others who, of course, were very modern, if you like, in thinking, but the idea of somehow debasing the... The, you know, one's knowledge on one's own experience in some immediate sense, which is what Descartes did. I mean, he admits, it's not inconsistent with the idea of God, but he's putting, you know, he's, he's, he's saying that he has to verify these fundamental things for himself. And the third thing he verifies is the infallibility of God's truth. Well, I know. I know, of course, but that's because the break hadn't been complete. One page to give this really. But that's also really the idea. But that's not the challenge there, because the initial dialectical move has already been broken with the kind of medieval theological one. The classics have already strained the category of God. But it would be hard to know that no one in Islam made that same rule. Since Descartes quite explicitly includes God, there's no use saying that these Islamic thinkers explicitly include God. No, I know, I know, because it led to the split. There was no such split in Islamic thinking. Well, except you're ascertaining that there was a split, and Colin is denying effectively that there was. No, that's not what I'm saying. I don't happen to know enough about the Islamic world to guarantee that there was never a split. I have no doubt that there was never a split. Of course there was. But Islamic philosophy as such. Unlike Christian philosophy? No, no, unlike philosophy in the West, Western philosophy. Which is a completely different thing from philosophy in Islamic countries, that's all I meant.

1:07:30 I'm telling you, I've talked to them, they still very much are Islamic philosophers of science. And they're from all over the place. And they admit, they told me themselves the contrast between Western philosophy and West philosophy of science and what's actually happening in the Islam. In Islam. They never made this. Break was never made. But you could say the same about Christian philosophy and others. No, no, but there's a thing that's distinguished. There is no distinction in Islamica between philosophy and what we might call Islamic philosophy. There is a difference between Christian philosophy and philosophy in Western cultures. That's all I'm saying. I understand the claim, but I'm not in the... Okay. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. The only thing I have to say is that I think that the difference is... Every philosophy taught in Turkey is Islamic philosophy. No, no, no, I didn't say that. I didn't say that there, but the nevertheless, no, behind the, but lurking behind the, the, the, the, the, there is, there is a philosophy, which, which, which is the central staff. Thank you for watching. The same degree of separation, at least as far as the Constitution is concerned, between state and religion, as the United States has had for at least 18 or 19 years. Well, of course, I'm not sure about the U.S. They may actually go back to the U.S. ...which is the majority of religion. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to seeing you again in the next lecture. Students studying in the other Palestinian universities are certainly not subject, you know, not because quite a significant majority of them are Christians or secular. Absolutely, very far.

1:10:00 You could say the same about Saudi Arabia. Well, I'll have to beat it. I think it is interesting, it is interesting. The only thing I can say is that they can't visa visa me out, so I think John's got good. There's this much to be said, that, okay, it takes him to the third move on the first floor, back in, to establish him in the central position, whereas with the, what John's calling, very loosely, the Islamic philosophical tradition, you've got the first line with that. I think there is a distinction there. Descartes did do something significantly. Well, it led to Kant. There was no equivalent to Kant or Hegel or Gates, you know, in Islamic countries. I mean, you may say that for various reasons. I mean, admittedly, you could give some kind of sociological explanation. Okay, I meant maybe it's oversimplification, but I just don't think that in the culture was made in the way that it happened in Europe, that atlantic cod and Hegel, and indeed the real, where you don't see God, you see God, the religion mentioned, they were perfectly happy, Leibniz was perfectly happy with the notion of the deity. You see it hardly mentioned in kinds there, possibly in Hegel, well, the zeitgeist, that's buried so far away, like it maybe shows up as some form of the zeitgeist, I mean, but really... But I know that large numbers of Indonesians and Lebanese thinkers count Descartes as part of their heritage because they take his course, my course on him. Okay, but I do think there's a city in terms of what I know the... Look, I mean, you know, I mean, of course, it depends on the extent to which you take these things as part of the mainstream of culture. All we know is that there are. What do you think of Jack Hill?

1:12:30 I tried to get him over to the side of the table, but I'm not going to do that. I was very impressed with Steve Morty in particular. He's very good. He's a very good one.

1:17:30 But on the other hand, he's great. But he happens at least to be one of the local people like Steve Orton. I wrote a letter to Steve Orton, and I'm the local speaker. In the case of someone who really is still a lot more active, I was going to exasperate him from the dreadful experience he had as a mathematician.

1:20:00 But I confess, when I wanted to take him, I thought he might come with me. He would have remained my student, I suppose, if I had made it. We're very close friends. He said, well, I went to go to Oxford. Fine, because he didn't want to come. He said, well, Dane isn't there anymore. I'm wondering about Angus as a philosopher. He said, I always thought you had strength of attention. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Let me be honest. Let me be honest. So I didn't mean it's incompatible, you know, I hope that it is. I said, well, I don't know, let's be fine, Angus is a great, very nice man, personally, of course, but I couldn't see any philosophy in it. Anyway, well, you see, after a couple of days, I met him, well, I met him, oh yes, and he was, well, well, you see, Angus turned out to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very. I would like to have been there to listen to that. That must have been a very interesting... Do you have any recollection of his proof of his... Mathematics is taken seriously as part of general culture in France. Admittedly, it's very remote. No, you can go to the railway station in Nancy and buy comic books about Riemann and Kant. No, really. And in Italy, too. And in Italy, too. And in Italy, the Journal of the Railwaymen's Union. The Railwaymen's Trade Union. Well, clearly, it's a long-since-ceased heritage that has any real... Computers are technically doing it sort of unconsciously, but it's not regarded as an architecture, in the sense that you become entertained by it. The way of music, painting, all the things that artists take very seriously, but they have to sell the stuff to the general public. There are not practitioners, and the only one who really likes that is a practitioner. Why is that the computer? That's changing. You're a natural sort of engineer. I'm usually not that great at listening. They're not even listening.

1:22:30 You know, it doesn't matter how difficult the performance is, for example, it's amazingly complicated, it's an extremely difficult plane. Well, the demolition of general relativity is that there are these Gödel solutions where world lines are closed, and we know a priori that can't happen. Now that debauches the whole of the philosophy of general relativity. Yeah, well that's what most of the general relativists think as well, they just think that makes no sense. It's called an unphysical solution. Yeah, you might know a priori it's an unphysical solution. Peter knew a priori that it overthrew general relativity. Oh, I see, so he's never heard of things called boundary conditions. You mean to go to a solution? Yeah, that it allowed closed time paths and cannot allow closed time paths. Was this like 30 years ago? Yeah. The one on quantum mechanics was that if you take a curve over a finite interval, it doesn't really have a Fourier expansion. For more orthodox physicists, that doesn't refute quantum mechanics, that explains Heisenberg uncertainty in quantum mechanics. I have my own reservation about that. Well, of course. I mean, Heisenberg uncertainty is proved mathematically in a very recycled class of models. Very recycled models. And if you go to a realistic model, it doesn't apply. It's a very restricted class of models which are quite unrealistic. And if you go to realistic models, it doesn't apply. So it's most of the world. I'm waiting for the experimentalists to show me the trajectory of the electron around a nucleus.

1:25:00 The point is that it takes about 10-15 seconds for an electron to circle around a nucleus. So far, this is 10-15 seconds to circle around a nucleus. That's the order of magnitude. And then, so far, the clocks are able to make ticks. ...with about an accuracy of 10 minus 12, which means that between two ticks... You still have three orders of magnitude. A hundred thousand revolutions. A thousand revolutions. So, I mean, I'm not afraid to imagine that it's impossible to locate a plane, because between two ticks there are a thousand revolutions. But when we come and the experimentalists are closed to improve by three or four orders of magnitude... Well, then... Wait, wait, wait. But the claim of the usual theory... As I understand it, the claim of the usual theory would be, if we observe that electron, we have destroyed its orbit around the nucleus. We're not going to observe it as it orbits around the nucleus. This is not the theory, this is the philosophical interpretation. Well, the interpretation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a reservation. It's a reservation. No, certainly not. Technical reservation. And here's where I think that Einstein's conversation with Bohr is so fascinating, and Heisenberg pursued this, too. In a particular experiment, it turns out to agree with the classical estimate of irreducible error, just due to constraints on your model. So even Einstein couldn't expect an experiment that would somehow violate Heisenberg uncertainty, because even the classical problems of lens resolution, of interchange of momentum, already destroyed the data within that limit. I don't know why Nelson gave up this idea that quantum fluctuations are something to do with the world outside the laboratory, an electromagnetic interaction. To me, there's one thing which is usually overlooked. And statistical mechanics were used with the idea of an atomic system in a heat path. A system with infinitely many degrees of freedom, very, very large. But in actual physics, I mean, you can never dissociate your atom from the electromagnetic field. And the electromagnetic field has infinitely many degrees of freedom, and it's always smaller and smaller and smaller. It's the same atom. Of course, recent experiments, I mean, with frozen atoms have been able to more or less disconnect it.

1:27:30 At a fundamental level, it is not, and I mean... My colleague, my colleague, my colleague Quintanucci, Quintanucci is a very, very gifted experimentalist, but he doesn't like to indulge in too philosophical discussions, but he has his own opinion, he has his own opinion, but he doesn't want to disclose his own opinion, and I think he has been consistently working towards frozen atoms and lower and lower temperature and higher... Time resolution of the phenomena, I think you have something in mind, and I think what was thought experiment for many, many years will become a recurrent experiment within 20 years. And then, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see. They have already slowed photons down to an observable rate of speed through frozen atoms. But one more thing, the second principle of thermodynamics in the case of the entropy. Now we have real experiments showing that local violation. So it's a statistical statement that locally it violates. And we have very fantastic experiments showing that locally it violates. So what I expect is that all these rules about uncertainty and so on are statistical rules. Well, but they're going to be statistical in some way no one's imagined yet because there are very subtle theorems on this. They're very subtle theorems indeed. Yeah, but the variables are hidden just because they're under-reducing to look outside the box. Yeah, yeah. Because the electromagnetic field is part of it. Well, but they're also, if there are such hidden variables, they're variables of a kind nobody's thought of yet. Well, no, there are people, there are programs which, you know, have a comparison of what needs to be done. I thought you were going in the car. We are. My idea. My idea is not... Okay. Can I just finish up this very quickly? All right. All right. We don't have two men. Oh, sure. But no, we can go by ourselves. No, you just drive up here the same way that you go back to yourself. It's pretty dangerous. On the corner of the road I've come to be. Just where the road, the top of the road won't start to go down. On the left, you've got the bus stop on the right, a little hotel, and the bank's credit agriculture, which I really can't miss, is on the corner on the left.

1:30:00 Just as you come to the very top of the hill, before it starts to go back down on the other side, you turn up there and you go back, and the way you go, the highest point just before it starts to go down again, where there's that little roundabout, you'll see the bank on the left. They could in deriving philosophical consequences from calculation in an oversimplified case and a totally unrealistic case. I mean, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation is a mathematically valid derivation in a totally unrealistic case. But if it's going to be replaced by anything deeper, that deeper thing will be unlike anything anyone can imagine. Because all the candidates anyone has imagined can really be pretty well excluded by some fine theorems and some observations. No, I'm not sure. No, my point of view is that the model, the mathematical model, will not be changed. The consequences we derive from the model are valid only in oversimplified situations. In unrealistic situations. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. But the less simplified situation, when it's found... We'll have to be of a kind that no one has yet imagined. You don't think that any of the hydrodynamical models of the world are in the variable? So I'm not, that's not isolated. The world in which we live is nonlinear. Well, that's the point. Because all the models are dealing with isolated systems. They treat the system of electrons in a box as an isolated system. Well, okay, but there are hidden variable systems where you can assume these electrons in the box, the box isn't the whole system, Texas isn't the whole system, the solar system isn't the whole system. Now maybe, yeah, we need to look outside the solar system for what's influencing those things, but we've got good hidden variable arguments now that don't assume the system is just the box, that there can't be parameters being determined by anything anywhere in the universe. ... that are influencing this outcome. Not of a kind anyone's imagined yet. Now of course there could be some of a kind no one's imagined yet, but it doesn't depend in any way on supposing the system is isolated from outside the course. That's just irrelevant. Some of the hydrodynamical variables do, in fact, get round the bellicon on the front seat. But only by now. They didn't even push for it yet. I mean, you know, if you study meteorology and hydrodynamics, there's a huge amount of structure in there, which could easily...

1:32:30 There are some alternative explanations right now. We can't prove they don't work, because we can't prove much about them at all. That is pretty young.