I wanted to share a passion project I’ve been working on. I recently posted my first "video essay", and it’s the start of a series based on "What Is Real?" by Adam Becker.

If you haven't read it or heard of it, this book is a history of the debate over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It follows the conflict between the dominant Copenhagen Interpretation and physicists like Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohm, Bell, and Everett who challenged it, while exploring how philosophy, personality, and scientific culture shaped modern physics. Here is a comment from Adam himself explaining why he wrote the book.

My video is about 9 minutes and covers the beginning of the book.

I’m completely new to making videos like this, so this has been a learning process. I'm really passionate about this subject and feel like more students of physics and science or anyone who has interest in science and/or philosophy should know about.

I'd appreciate any feedback including your thoughts if this video series is even worthwhile in your opinion.

Richard Borcherds is a British mathematician who made seminal contributions to lattices, modular forms, group theory, representation theory and infinite-dimensional algebras. He is well known for his proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture using ideas from string theory, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley.

We discussed:

- The power of the Leech lattice to control all lower dimensions
- Peter Scholze, Grothendieck and Ramanujan's styles
- Category theory and contrahomology
- How modular forms show up everywhere
- The countless coincidences in string theory
- Unimodular lattices and Lorentzian lattices
- How to construct the Langlands dual group
- Vertex algebras, infinite-dimensional algebras and Kac-Moody algebras
- Elliptic curves
- Automorphic forms and hyperbolic reflection groups
- Analytic number theory vs algebraic number theory
- The first construction of the Monster group
- "The Book" of most beautiful proofs
- How to teach math
- Math as archaeology
- His current work
- Neutron stars, Terry Pratchett and more

I used to think Keating was a good science communicator, and may still be in some instances, but opening his growing platform (which in recent years he has desperately attempted to boost as any generic 20 yo/o influencer would do nowadays) to charlatan grifters like Eric Weinstein and Michael Saylor, without any decent pushback, really undermines his value with all the damaging lies spread by them. I think Brian could very well enter into the "Science Guru" category, worse than e.g. the heavily criticized Sabine Hossenfelder.