Frederic Schuller: The Physicist Who Derived Gravity From Electromagnetism
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How does Frederic Schuller claim to derive Einstein’s gravity directly from Maxwell’s electromagnetism?
I was stunned as a theoretical physicist. We now believe to have cracked at least two of the three most
prominent problems. Professor Frederick Schuller has done something that should be impossible. He's derived Einstein's general relativity from Maxwell's electromagnetism alone. Not postulated, not assumed, but derived. So you start with electromagnetic fields on an arbitrary background, you demand predictivity, and out pops not only that must the geometry be Lorentzian, but the dynamics. Must be Einsteinian. However, Schuller's Maverick conclusions don't end there. He's found a formalism from engineering which may help shed light on the measurement problem from an extremely unlikely place. This podcast was tremendously impactful to me, which is not something I often say about the math and physics podcasts on this channel.
The heartfelt impacts tend to come from explorations. Of meaning and even consciousness. But today, Frederick reveals for the first time his teaching philosophy and why starting from propositional logic and building all the way through set theory to differential geometry has resonated with millions of people. Professor Schuller shows physics as it actually is, a conceptual masterpiece, where every piece interlocks like a Da Vinci painting. This podcast will not only give you a new perspective on physics, but will fundamentally change how you think about physics. Welcome, Professor. Thank you very much, Kurt. This was a long time in the making, right? Yes, many, many months. Yes, yes. So tell me, what are you working on these days?
What's in your mind research wise?
Research wise, I'm thinking about foundations of quantum mechanics these days, and I never wanted to do that because that's a very, very thorny subject, and of course there are obvious problems, the measurement problem uh above all, uh that bother me, but they bother me from a new angle. And this new angle is that in Engineering. I work a lot with engineers these days at the University of Twente. Right. And uh with uh they have a very strong robot robotics lab, many groups And I learned something in two thousand. uh twenty actually, I was invited to uh to participate in a small conference, actually not that small after all, uh in Paris, and I saw their engineers and they talked about something that's called the Port Hamiltonian approach to dynamics.
And this is in essence an extension of Hamiltonian theory. It's just that you do not only provide the formalism to talk about a closed system where no energy can flow out or in, you talk about open systems where energy can flow out, but you don't say how it flows out. There is an open port that gives you the possibility to for it to flow out. And if you take two such systems, you can connect them via something is called the Dirac structure that has been studied before. And that is a different decomposition of a physical system governed by a Hamiltonian, say classical mechanics, classical field theory, than we would usually have. We would usually describe it as one big system, and we would talk a lot about energy flowing from that part of the system to that part of the system.
Especially if you think about kinetic and potential energy. Even in the in introductory lectures, we talk about energy flowing from the kinetic energy to the potential energy back and forth, such that all of energy is conserved. We do a good talk on this, right? But ultimately it's just talk. It's not reflected in the formalism in how we describe the theory. Why is that what is that good for? It's just a rewriting, right? But engineers have the need to control energy flows. For instance, if you have robots interacting with humans, and the robots have uh uh uh you know joints and so on. If the robot interacts, there's of course energy being transmitted from from the human being and so on. And how do you actually capture this?
Does the robot react to this? If you want to study this and you need to study this because that robot might otherwise decapitate you. If there is an unwanted energy flow, so to speak.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How does Frederic Schuller claim to derive Einstein’s gravity directly from Maxwell’s electromagnetism?
0:00–15:07
2
Why does Schuller introduce port‑Hamiltonian theory and probability ports to address the quantum measurement problem?
15:07–43:14
3
How can one start from Maxwell’s equations and obtain the Einstein‑Hilbert action for gravity?
43:14–1:02:25
4
What is Schuller’s teaching philosophy and how does he build a differential‑geometry course from propositional logic?
1:02:25–1:15:36
5
Why is hand‑waving dangerous in physics and how should concepts be defined?
1:15:36–1:16:51
6
What is the core difficulty in formulating a quantum theory of gravity?
1:16:51–1:22:52
7
Why might quantizing gravity be unnecessary – can a stochastic or classical approach work?
1:22:52–1:37:07
8
How do teaching methods and the use of motivating examples affect learning physics?
1:37:07–2:29:22
Speakers
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