Adam Brown

irrational optimism to sort of ride out the initial discouraging things that you'll discover as you go along.

So I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories.

Before the LHC turned on, there was certainly a lot of

high energy theorists making extremely confident predictions about what we'd see at the LHC, and it was typically their own favorite particle that we'd see.

And while I'd love to have found supersymmetry, it would, in some sense, felt somewhat unjust to reward the hubris of people making overconfident and poorly calibrated predictions.

So yeah, that's definitely a thing that happens.

Yeah, I think that's basically right.

I mean, the same is kind of true of

In other domains of life as well, of course, you know, startups.

If you were properly calibrated about how likely your startup to succeed would be, maybe you wouldn't do it.

But it's good for the ecosystem that certain people are willing to give it a go.

Yeah, I think it's good for the ecosystem and perhaps bad for the individual to be well calibrated.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so what do we mean by mine black hole?

Mine black hole means take the energy out of a black hole that used to be in a black hole.

Obviously, if our distant descendants have used up all of the energy and stars and everything else, the black hole might be the last thing they turn their eye to.

Yeah, so can you get energy out of black holes at all?

The old story, pre-1970s, is no.

Black hole is one way matter falls in, it never comes out, it's stuck.