Adam Brown – Einstein's happiest thought: General Relativity from scratch
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
Transcript preview
Preview only
I'm back with Adam Brown. You currently lead BlueShift at Google DeepMind, is cracking science and reasoning. In a previous life, Adam was a prolific physicist, taught at Stanford, and did research on everything from cosmology to string theory to general relativity. It said that general relativity is the most beautiful thing the human mind has ever conceived or seen. And I was curious if there's a way that ordinary people like me could understand what is happening or have some vintage on why it's beautiful without taking your 20 lecture graduate course. So that was the prompt for this lecture,
to do it. Super exciting to be here. And yes, I think the answer is yes. Yes, we can. Yeah. So, I mean, general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity is, as I think, as you say, like, the most beautiful product of a single mind that we've ever created. It's one of the two great theories of twentieth century physics along with quantum mechanics. Unlike quantum mechanics, it was basically Einstein. He had a little help, but basically one person doggedly pursuing this idea for ten years and then wrote down this theory that ends up describing the motion of planets in the solar system and also t
You better know your physics, Adam. Otherwise, it'll destroy the studio.
No tricks. Will you will you put your finger in that and confirm that it's it's wet? Okay. So here is the bucket. At the bottom, no no mystery why the water is not falling out of the bucket. It's not falling out because the point force of gravity, as we'd understand it, is pointing down to the bottom of the bucket. But now what we're gonna do is go a little bit faster and loop the loop. And now there is what you might find superficially surprising, which is that the water doesn't fall out of the bucket even when the bucket is upside down. And there are two ways to understand that. One way is j
As I've gotten to know the folks at Jane Street, I've noticed that a lot of them have physics backgrounds. I recently got a chance to talk to Jed Thompson, who was a particle physicist before he was a trader, about how his physics training helps him with his work at Jane Street. I think very few Jane Street traders or researchers come in with any, finance background or any trading background. When I used to be in physics, something that I would say is I almost never do a calculation without already having a pretty good guess at the answer. In trading, I think the same is true. These things are
So this is a radical idea because it requires us to be wrong about what a straight line is. In particular, you sitting here, just sitting in your chair, here is your height above the center of the Earth as a function of time. And here is Door Cache, just sitting here at constant height. Because you are experiencing the force of gravity, if gravity is an inertial force, because you're a force down, that means that you have to be moving along a not straight line. So that's you. By contrast, this piece of chalk, as it goes up and down, executes something that's well approximated by a parabola. Th
I can tell you're a physicist because of the very idealized forms of the continents.
And sometimes it can be quite frustrating sitting there in the back seat of the airplane because you know, obviously, the plane should be flying, like this, moving along the shortest distance from one place to another. But instead, they take this massive detour, that clips Greenland and heads on down. You know that, in fact, that's not what's going on. You know that, in fact, despite what it looks like on the graph, this is not a straight l
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.