David Finkelstein 10 minute talk about his career, skyrmions

David Finkelstein (whose research helped convince Roger Penrose that event horizons and black holes exist), had a 10-minute chat about his career in which he explained gravitational skyrmions (or kinks). Here is the transcript:


Interviewer: David you've had a remarkable career more than 50 years in quantum theory relativity much pioneering work you know reflect back on your career on your thoughts [on] the development of the field. What insights can you give?

David: Well, the starting point for me with this understanding that quantum theory forces you to give up the old logic and replace it by a new one this was spelled out pretty explicitly by Heisenberg and Bohr and a lot of people have pursued this besides me the simplest way I have of understanding neurologic is that you really turn your attention away from objects toward processes they become more fundamental than the objects we used to think of processes as things one object does to another and no objects are defined by the processes that are carried out on them so process is more fundamental than object that's the way I've had to think about it simply because quantum theory is almost entirely a language of processes it's full of things called operators and oddly enough they represent operations and the whole language is just operators, so it's all just operations. There are two nouns floating around but they're fixed so they may never be mentioned namely there's the Observer who does the operations as a system he's studying on which the operations are done but they're fixed things so they don't even occur in the language only ever talk about are the operations so this replaces the old kind of object ontology by what might be called a process ontology but that's almost a contradiction in terms because ontology is about being and process is about doing I haven't been able to find a good word to replace ontology except possibly Dynamics.

Interviewer: Now does this impose real fundamental change in a reality or it's just a different way of expressing the same thing?

David: Well, I guess it's a fundamental change in that now real is a four-letter word I mean real means thing like and there are no things for me so real is very unreal okay so real by the way in when I presented some of these hues at a conference of Colombia one of the participants Dalai Lama took to calling me Mr actuality because I'm happy to say things are actual when I'm unhappy to say they're real okay definers of the root actual act was is what's going on but what is and so therefore the word actual has more of a process field exactly whereas real has a more of a static permanence right I find it's one of the big traps is objectification and calling things real tends to make you think they're real and calling them actual I find safer I stole the word from Alfred North Whitehead, the English philosopher.

Interviewer: Now I want to get my hands on the difference between actual and real actual you're
saying has a processed part to it but when you're saying that things are not real?

David: I mean what is that it really means you're shifting your attention from the objects to the actions but does that really mean that the objects are really not real or just as you should you should now pay more attention to the process as opposed to the object if you look into what people mean when they say that things are real it turns out whether they know it or not they're saying they obey ordinary logic either a or not a not a and not a at the same time and a and b or c is the same as a and b or a and C they apply ordinary logic to real things saying they're real means you don't have to worry about what happened to them when you know about them you just know them as they are and that's all bad news for quantum mechanics you don't know things as they are in relativity we learned you know things as they were because it takes time for the light to reach you and in quantum theory even that goes because the light changed them on the way so you can get into a a notion where everything sort of dissolves if you think too hard about it unless you focus on the actions and even there you have to give up trying to say too much about yourself just say what you know I do this I find that I hold polarizers this way hold another one this way half the time the photon goes through and you can get away with ordinary language as long as you're talking about ordinary actions.

Interviewer: And then from this you're actually predicting Real Results that is very quantitative very predictable and very certain that that are real results?

David: I would say the quantum theory is the most practical tactics there is and I like to say that in the root sense it has to do exclusively with practice it's practical in the sense of being pragmatic. For me it fits into the philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce, the American pragmatist but that's a matter of taste.

Interviewer: And what are some of the areas that you've dealt with in your career from this perspective?

David: The first thing I wanted to do was make sure you couldn't easily make model developmental particles out of ordinary continuous old-fashioned space-time and um could I borrow your belt I'll show you a model of an elementary particle.

Interviewer: All right my belt normally has much more pedestrian uses but I'd be happy to.

David: Okay. By the way in in physics there were three important Bell tricks it's just one of them the one who introduced these tricks is Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac one of uh my heroes and um this model for an element of particle is called a skyrmion who studied by the physicist Skyrme. If you have a belt like this and you put a Twist in it if you hold the ends fixed the twist can run back and forth but the number of twists is Frozen yes it's either there or it's not there or you can have two can collide and one can come out on either side so though they behave very much like Elementary particles except they're not at any one point they're distributed okay so though the scare me on so the twists can go all the way up and down right and there's a whole mathematical theory of the collisions of these twists that have been worked out turns out this is also a pretty good model of what can happen in space-time yeah um this I do with my fingers in space time you have these little arrows telling light which way to go they're called they form what are called light cones and if you think of this as a Time axis and this is a space axis then here is a little skeleton of a light cone showing this is might be a spark and here is a ray going off in One Direction there's a ray going off on the other it's actually expanding sphere of light ball of light but this represents it and then in a gravitational field these light cones twist and sway like lilies in the wind that's Gravity the bending of space-time and this is a gravitational skyrmion there's a full two Pi rotation a full circular rotation a light cone from one side of the world to the other side and if that happens coming in from all directions that structure is so entangled in space-time that it cannot be ironed out you have to cut to get rid of it you can move it around behaves like a particle but you can't get rid of it it's an absolutely conserved structure so what's the implications of that that unfortunately for my program it is possible to make particle-like structures out of space-time I call them Kinks but I think they can be called gravitational skyrmions. They come right after skyrmions, thought looking at them I noticed that each of these things surrounds Itself by a little shell where all the light is going in and then it's coming out so this is my first encounter I called it a uni-directional membrane a real catchy name and uh it was renamed black hole all right and uh people had been studying them in general relativity for a decade or more before I came along I didn't know about it um and I was I was really disappointed that it existed but I wrote it up and it turned out to be useful for understanding the uh the structure of the gravitational field of a point particle it triggered a lot of the early work on the black hole but for me it was something I had to leave behind because I wasn't interested in the Continuum of space-time I was sort of disappointed that it had this richness in it I wanted to explain all of the particles using Quantum space time that was the direction I actually took then.

Interviewer: So reflecting back now on your entire career more than 50 years?

David: Oh my! I can't reflect back on my entire career because most of it is in the future okay?

Draghi report

From the Draghi report summary:

The report acknowledges that the era in which the European Union relied on cheap Russian energy, boundless Chinese markets, and U.S. security is over.

Innovation, Decarbonization, Competitiveness, and Security

The first challenge is innovation. Draghi notes Europe’s strong innovation capacity but highlights that over one-third of its corporate “unicorns” relocate abroad, primarily to the United States, due to regulatory, financial, and training barriers. To bridge this gap, the report proposes several measures: creating a European Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), incentivizing business angels and seed capital, involving the European Investment Bank, reforming pension plan regulations to channel European savings toward investment, and simplifying the research and development (R&D) framework program. It also suggests enhancing academic excellence, investing in research infrastructure, increasing R&D spending, and fostering a more innovation-friendly regulatory ecosystem. A focus on lifelong learning to upgrade workers’ skills is also emphasized.

The second challenge is aligning decarbonization with competitiveness. The energy crisis has led to significantly higher energy costs in Europe, which is undermining European competitiveness. Thus, the effort to decarbonize is an economic necessity. Draghi argues that decarbonization can boost competitiveness if well-managed but risks undermining it if it is poorly executed, especially if dependent on subsidized Chinese technologies. With European firms already facing higher energy costs than their U.S. counterparts, this disparity threatens growth if clean energy benefits do not lead to lower prices. Draghi advocates for a reform of the European electricity market to pass decarbonization benefits to consumers and suggests European-level industrial policies in clean technologies and electric vehicles to maintain a level playing field. The report details sector-specific competitiveness measures for energy, clean technologies, key raw materials, automotive, pharmaceuticals, transport, aerospace, and high-tech sectors.

The third challenge lies in investing and integrating Europe’s defense industry. The report gives a brutally frank assessment of the poor state of Europe’s defense industrial sector. Analyzing the sector through an economist’s lens, Draghi highlights the sector’s intense fragmentation when what it needs is scale and demand aggregation. Like the EU Defense Industrial Strategy, Draghi also highlights the amount of money spent on procurement outside of the European Union, which is as high as 80 percent. The report calls for more EU funding and an EU Defense Industry Authority to procure on behalf of EU countries, thereby aggregating demand and taking advantage of economies of scale. The report also calls for a European preference principle to “buy European” that could come with incentives—a recommendation that will make U.S. defense companies nervous.

Fourth, on economic security, the report stresses the need for greater EU strategic autonomy and economic security to reduce susceptibility to economic coercion by third countries. This requires increased defense spending, a more autonomous defense industry, and a policy for securing critical minerals. While acknowledging the high costs of autonomy, Draghi suggests mitigating these through cooperation among member states and trade agreements with non-EU member countries. The report also proposes a “foreign economic policy” that involves joint investments and purchases based on the European Union’s large internal market. Contrary to U.S. protectionism, Draghi supports free trade agreements as tools to enhance security and derisking.

Financing the Plan

Draghi quantifies the additional annual investment needs at over €800 billion, or about 5 percent of EU GDP.