Eric Weinstein's Criticism of Leonard Susskind in Physics Debate

Eric Weinstein's critique of Leonard Susskind highlights a contentious debate in theoretical physics.

### The Controversial Exchange: Eric Weinstein vs. Leonard Susskind in Theoretical Physics
* 🎙 Eric Weinstein criticized Leonard Susskind on the Modern Wisdom podcast, accusing him of **damaging the careers of his colleagues** while acknowledging his **charm and popularization of science**.
* 🧠 Weinstein stated, "You've chosen to be, um, words like '**family**' to me and uh, to just about everyone who came up with a competitor theory," highlighting the **personal impact** of Susskind's actions.
* 📚 While praising Susskind's contributions to popular science, Weinstein claimed he is a "**wolf gang**" who has failed to achieve **significant accomplishments**, suggesting his future in physics looks **bleak** at age 85.
* 🔍 Susskind responded to Weinstein's criticisms on Kurt Jaimungal's podcast, stating he was **unfamiliar with Weinstein's theories and contributions**, emphasizing the **disconnect between the two physicists**.
* 📈 The discussion also touched on the importance of **healthy dialogue and criticism** in science, with Weinstein proposing a conference to bring together physicists and **challenge their theories**.
* 🌌 The video explores Susskind's groundbreaking ideas like the **holographic principle** and **black hole complementarity**, asserting his **significant impact on theoretical physics** despite criticisms.
* 🛠 The potential revival of the Shelter Island conferences is suggested as a way to **foster collaboration and innovation** in the field, emphasizing the need for **collegiality among physicists**.
* 📖 Overall, the exchange raises questions about the **nature of scientific criticism** and the responsibility of theorists to **engage in constructive dialogue** rather than personal attacks.

Recently, Eric Weinstein made several critical statements about Leonard Susskind, also known as Lenny Susskind, on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast. He had some accusations about Lenny's behavior and influence on the field, but also a commentary on Lenny's performance.

As a scientist, the good Dr. Susskind, and I say, 'No, no, no, you have 40 years of the destruction of your colleagues to answer for. You've chosen to be, um, words like 'family' to me and uh, to just about everyone who came up with a competitor theory.'

I've dealt with Leonard directly. He also said, 'While Lenny is a great popularizer of science, writing very clear introductory books, he can be charming. He's a great raconteur. He's very brilliant, and he chooses to be a wolf'

gang, a boy without achievement. He's taken a massive advance on a future career which he will never have at age 85, and finally he claimed the future for Lenny looks bleak.' Eric has some choice words for other physicists later on in the podcast. He talked about Mitch Okaku,

Andy Strominger, and Vafa. Not to be outdone, Lenny had this to say about Eric on Kurt Jaimungal's fascinating conversation on his podcast 'Theories of Everything.' 'Eric Weinstein's is that general relativity itself contains the ingredients of P Salam along with the three generations

and cosmological constant, which I could explain to you at another point. I don't know who Eric Weinstein is. I don't know his theory, so I, I, I can't comment.' At the end of this video, we're going to focus on a proposal that Eric makes that I

I think is brilliant for transforming the world of theoretical physics and even some experimental goodness thrown in for people like me who like to build instruments. Welcome back to my channel where we dive deep into the fascinating world of science and the minds behind it that shape it. And Eric Weinstein is no

slouch. He's been a frequent guest in the podcast. He has incredible ideas for transforming physics and he even has his own idea called geometric Unity, which I've hosted him on the podcast many times to talk about and even brought him down to UC San Diego to lecture

about it and meet with fellow physicist Dan Green in a podcast recorded just last year. This is all part of my assayer project where I attempt to discover what experimental tests can we use to apprise and appraise different theories of everything and string theory is the

granddaddy of them all in terms of theories of everything. Now Lenny's a friend and it's hard to hear criticism especially in such harsh terms. I'll first say he's a renowned scientist with many, many tens of thousands of citations and an H-index that's higher than the

temperature of Miami in the summer. He's written many textbooks and even popular level writing and discussed considerations where he himself has done battle, though very quietly, with his late friend Stephen Hawking. I've always found him to be a mensch. It's hard

to see him described as some Voldemort-like character. Now I want to point out that Eric has criticized many, many physicists, not personally necessarily but about their theories, and even in the video with Chris he mentions Peter Woit, who has two theories that may be alternatives to string theory, and I've

hosted him with Garrett Lisi and about those theorists he's always claimed that his theory is correct, generic unity, and those theories are wrong. Eric describes at least the physics content of those other competitor theories to his in quite harsh terms, that they're wrong, etc.

As he said in the video with Chris, now Chris is not a physicist so I don't expect him to have comebacks to all these things. These people, and I want to specifically call out the most aggressive of them, Lu Luos modal Mokaku,

Susin, uh Jeff Harvey, Michael Duff, uh Andy Stringer, Kum and Vafa, have been on a tear that nothing else exists, destroying 40 years of competitors. This raises an important question: if Eric is criticizing multiple physicists for their work, could his own actions be

contributing to the very issue he attributes to others? Is it a double standard in other words, or is it fair game for people to criticize people's theories, including Eric's? So let's dive deep first of all into the first claim that Lenny Susskind's contributions are

limited to popularization and only to string theory. Let's see what impact they've had on the field of physics as a whole and if they'll be remembered as being a great physicist. First of all, let's get out of the way the fact that Eric alludes to in the beginning that

he's one of the pioneers of string theory. In fact, it's quite remarkable he started off as a plumber in the 60s and uh is somewhat self-taught, going to Yeshiva University in New York and not one of the renowned centers for science.

and then rising to the level of named distinguished chair professor at Stanford University. So one of his most innovative ideas was a step towards unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, which we've talked about many times on this podcast. And as you know, I

also believe that string theory has a monopoly on high energy particle physics. I don't believe, to the extent that Eric does, that it's destroyed people's lives. Maybe I'm ignorant about those particular instances, but they're not mentioned in this video. But what else

has he done? Is he just a one-string pony? One of Lenny's most influential contributions is known as the holographic principle. This concept suggests that all the information contained within a volume of space can be represented on the boundary of that

space. It's sort of like a hologram in simple terms. Our three-dimensional universe could be described by information encoded on a two-dimensional surface. The surface of a ball, for example, doesn't contain all the information of a normal ball because you can't see into the ball, you can't

understand the micro-states, the micro-configurations of that state. But for the holographic principle, for certain objects like black holes, all the information about the black hole is captured by its external surface area, the boundary which separates it from other objects in three dimensions. Think

of like how a hologram stores what looks like a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface. This makes credit cards very difficult to reproduce and fake because it's very difficult to make a hologram. But this is the principle of it. Another astounding cont

contribution made by Leonard Susskind was the concept of black hole complementarity which he introduced to address the so-called black hole information paradox now past guests on the show,  Sean Carroll and  Stephen Wolfram, will make an appearance later on

suggests this is not really a paradox and they've had their own battles but suffice it to say the majority of physicists side with Lenny that information is not lost within a black hole and is instead preserved offering a potential reconciliation between quantum mechanics

and general relativity both the holographic principle and complementarity were later used by one of Lenny's protégés, Juan Maldacena, at the Institute for Advanced Study who's made many contributions in what's called anti-de Sitter space conformal field

theory or AdS/CFT and those were invoking and understanding the properties of wormholes and understanding that the properties and the holographic principle play a large role in Maldacena's work the study of the strong nuclear force, quantum chromodynamics, Lenny contributed greatly

back in the early 70s and 80s in fact criticizing the Weinberg-Salam model in the 1970s he took a rightful place in his contributions to the standard model of particle physics now these are very disjoint and distinct contributions

black holes have almost nothing to do with quarks and the inner workings of nuclei and yet he's made these contributions furthermore he's explored the impact of quantum information with regard to what's called quantum entanglement he's explored the deep

connections between entanglement and space-time geometry. His work on the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen conjecture proposes a link between entangled particles and wormholes. Then again, that connection to wormholes, we would later go on to work on

aspects of wormholes that could be traversable by human beings. So the Einstein-Rosen bridge is another name for a wormhole and there's a conjecture there might be a possibility to unify the world of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, or spooky action at a distance aspects

of quantum mechanics interpretation that Einstein found so distasteful. And then last but certainly not least, Lenny's been a renowned educator. He's one of the most beloved educators I overlapped with him in 1999-2000 when I was a young

postdoc at Stanford University. He was always available to students. He was completely dedicated to them. You'd see him walking around with his backpack and, and Eric even describes him as quite avuncular. But he's also done an incredible job popularizing science. His book, The Black Hole War with Stephen

Hawking, how he helps save quantum mechanics, is one of the timeless classics of modern popularizations of physics and it's very, very detailed and full of just chunky tofu or Satan or whatever you like to eat. I'm not going

to say meat, it turns off the vegetarians. His book series, The Theoretical Minimum, has helped countless students grasp the fundamentals of physics, including me and Eric's own son Zev, who I've uh, had the honor and privilege of mentoring along with my good friend and colleague Stefan

Alexander Zev was a self-starter as Eric describes in the podcast and very, very motivated, but the contributions of Lenny's books played at least a small role in Eric's son's physics education. And now he's quite frankly off the charts, so it's important to have healthy

dialogue and scientific criticism. This is part of that dialogue, of course. Eric also rails against peer review, which is one of the few ways that scientists can get criticism anonymously and, um, and somewhat dispassionately, in a way that is not conflicted, where we can, uh,

exchange information about our research, our experiments, our theories, and get them reviewed by independent third parties and eventually published. Yes, it's not perfect, but as I always say, peer review is the worst system except for all the others. I've had Steven Wolfram on to talk about his physics project

with Eric at the same time. I'm not pro-String Theory, I'm not anti-String Theory, but I'm for a healthy marketplace of ideas because questioning those ideas and challenging them is a fundamental part of science. We must do so respectfully and constructively. It's

impossible just to dismiss the work of others without engaging in a meaningful dialogue. And that brings us to Eric's proposal at the end. Well, hopefully somebody will come up with some money to hold a conference to get these people in the same room with the people they've

tormented, whose careers they've ended, whose funds they've stolen. The stolen valor of actual achievements in real attempts to change physics. And wouldn't it be delicious and fun to see Michio Kaku, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Michael Duff, Jeff

Harvey actually has to face people who know what they're talking about. Eric proposes a conference where you'll bring people in to discuss their theories of everything. At first, he says this is to do something that's expose what is interesting and what he calls 'anti-in uh...'

in that if you want to humiliate somebody, you should bring them in just to give a lecture, and he claims he hasn't been offered chances to lecture. He brings up in this latter topic in the very last segment a chance to get physicists together and to me it echoes

something Eric and I have talked about which were called The Shelter Island conferences. They took place in the late 1940s and they included some of the most incredible, most monumental names in all physics. And what Eric might be suggesting aside from the firing squad

where we get everybody together in a star chamber and they, Strominger and Witten and Lenny have to answer to their crimes. Let's ignore that. I don't think Eric's really serious about that, as no one's going to come and partake in

a conference where the first order of business is to is to roast them mercilessly. Will you find a squad, but these Shelter Island conferences, they could be reconstructed and in fact I'm trying to reconstruct them right now with colleagues at Stonybrook University where I was born

and grew up. So this will be quite excellent, but let me review what happened during the first Shelter Island conference in 1947. Willis Lamb discussed the Lamb shift, the slight difference in energy levels within the hydrogen atom not predicted by the theory that existed

Quantum field theory that existed before 1947, this led to an immediate breakthrough, and then calculations now agree, and soon after agreed to many, many decimal places. Hans Bethe performed a calculation of the Lamb shift during these conferences using a rudimentary form of what would be called later

renormalization theory. He did this on the train ride home on the Long Island Railroad. This work laid the groundwork for more comprehensive renormalization theory, which is transformative in modern physics. Feynman diagrams were introduced by Richard Feynman, the path integral formulation

were introduced at this conference with what would later become known as these simplifying, beautiful hieroglyphics called Feynman diagrams, visualizing complex particle interactions, but not just for their own beauty, to actually do calculations based on this. And then the graph theory and network theory that

they represent later could be coded, and we can get millions of terms. Corrections we know we can predict so much more accurately than we can measure. But that was part of the incredible synergy that took place bringing experimentalists and theorists together in one place. We do

need to do that again, and Eric is right about that. Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize with Feynman and Tomonaga, continued to make contributions to quantum field theory. There were something like 10 Nobel laureates or future laureates there. B

Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger, and Willis Lamb, too, won the Nobel Prize in 1955. Hans Bethe went on to win the Nobel Prize, not for renormalization theory, but for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis. Later, he became an advocate for nuclear

disarmament. Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, he continued to be a prominent force in nuclear physics and policy. Robert Oppenheimer was the organizer of this conference. It's a little-known fact that after his role in the Manhattan Project, he became a key

player in the lubrication of science exchanges and interaction. Now, that wasn't the only conference. Again, it was held uh in 1949. Two years later was the second Shelter Island conference, and there was such rapid progress between 1947 and 1949 that they were able to

explore newly discovered particles, pions and muons, and explore their roles in nuclear forces and weak interactions. The congregants at the second Shelter Island conference discussions revolved around refining renormalization techniques, increasing the theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics and establishing

emerging new paradigms that young physicists at the time would later go on to have groundbreaking research laying the future for things like the QCD theory, Quark Theory. Another dynamic duo who were there produced research that would later bear fruit on what I'm

studying. It's called parity violation, and that's Chen Ning Yang and T.D. Lee. They discussed works of a proposal for parity violation in weak interactions and they were awarded the Nobel Prize just eight years later. Their work fundamentally changed the understanding of symmetries

in physics. My late great friend Freeman Dyson, the very first guest I ever had on the Into The Impossible podcast, he was there and I discussed that with him. He demonstrated the equivalence of the propositions and the formalism of Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

leading to the reconciliation of their two different approaches to QED. Many people say that Freeman deserved a Nobel Prize, and I agree with that. Enrico Fermi was there just after World War II had ended. He continued to have an influence on particle accelerators and nuclear

reactors until his very, very untimely death just 5 years later. Abraham Pais was there, and he contributed to particle physics and he would later write influential histories of modern physics and the physicists that we've been discussing in this video. And last but

certainly not least, John Archibald Wheeler, who worked on gravitational physics, pioneered quantum information theory. Think about it. From bit, he was there as well. The first and second Shelter Island conferences had a huge impact on physics that's still reverberating to this day.

And for that reason, I agree with Eric, we should have a third Shelter Island conference, maybe back in Shelter Island at the Rams Head Inn, where I went once on a 20-mile bike ride from Stony Brook all the way there, and I almost died on the

way back. But that's a story for another, another discussion that should not let us hinder having a third Shelter Island conference. And the last thing I'll say couples into the last topic I mentioned about Lenny, which is his outreach and public interactions that he's had that

was also an outgrowth of the Shelter Island conferences. The collaborative spirit and the groundbreaking work presented there had a lasting impact, influencing not only the careers of the attendees or just the trajectory of modern physics, but also in the public. It continues to inspire physicists and the

public alike, and for that I think that were we to have one, we should invite people like Lenny Susskind, Ed Witten, even Mitch Oaku. Why not? But we should do so with a spirit of collegiality. So thank you for joining me on this quick deep

dive into the sociology of science, I guess it is technically a reaction video. I couldn't let this one slide, and I hope uh it gets to people like Eric and even Lenny so that they can see the kinds of dynamical conversations that they've

inspired, and I encourage you to check out the short clip on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast and also check out my interview with Lenny Susskind and a whole lot of Eric Weinstein's greatest appearances on the Into the Impossible podcast.

What's Wrong With Leonard Susskind?

Dr Brian Keating

Eric Weinstein's Criticism of Leonard Susskind

Weinstein criticizes Susskind's behavior and influence on the field of physics.

Weinstein accuses Susskind of harming colleagues' careers over 40 years.

Weinstein acknowledges Susskind's skills as a science popularizer and raconteur but describes him negatively.

Weinstein extends his criticism to other physicists, including Mitch Okaku, Andy Strominger, and Vafa.

Susskind responds to Weinstein's criticism by stating he doesn't know Weinstein or his theories.

Defense of Leonard Susskind and Contextualization of Weinstein's Criticism

The speaker defends Susskind, highlighting his significant contributions and high citation count.

The speaker notes that Weinstein frequently criticizes physicists and their theories.

The speaker questions whether Weinstein's actions contribute to the issues he criticizes in others.

The speaker raises the question of double standards in criticizing physicists' work.

Leonard Susskind's Contributions to Physics

The speaker refutes the claim that Susskind's contributions are limited to popularization and string theory.

The speaker discusses Susskind's work on the holographic principle.

The speaker discusses Susskind's contribution to black hole complementarity.

The speaker highlights Susskind's influence on Juan Maldacena's work.

The speaker mentions Susskind's contributions to the standard model of particle physics.

The speaker discusses Susskind's work on quantum entanglement and its connection to space-time geometry.

The speaker emphasizes Susskind's role as a renowned educator and science popularizer.

The Importance of Scientific Dialogue and Peer Review

The speaker discusses the importance of peer review in scientific criticism.

The speaker advocates for a healthy marketplace of ideas and respectful scientific criticism.

Eric Weinstein's Proposal for a Physics Conference

Weinstein proposes a conference to facilitate dialogue between physicists with differing views.

The speaker interprets Weinstein's proposal as a way to foster open discussion and collaboration.

The Shelter Island Conferences as a Model

The speaker suggests that the Shelter Island conferences serve as a model for productive scientific collaboration.

The speaker describes key achievements and collaborations from the first Shelter Island conference in 1947.

The speaker discusses the second Shelter Island conference and its significant contributions.

The speaker concludes by advocating for a third Shelter Island conference to foster collaboration and dialogue.