Andrew Strominger

It took a whole century.

to sort out the new insights that we got.

Adding the experimental thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a whole sort of wonderful century.

I mean, the seed of general relativity was the incompatibility of Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field

with Newton's laws of gravity.

They were incompatible, because if you look at Maxwell's theory, there's a contradiction if anything goes faster than the speed of light.

But Newton's theory of gravity, the...

gravitational field, the gravitational force, is instantaneously transmitted across the entire universe.

So you could, if you had a friend in another galaxy with a very sensitive

measuring device that could measure the gravitational field.

They could just take this cup of coffee and move it up and down in Morse code, and they could get the message instantaneously over another galaxy.

That leads to all kinds of contradictions.

It's not self-consistent.

It was exactly in resolving those contradictions that Einstein came up with the general theory of gravity.

And it's fascinating how this contradiction, which seems like maybe it's kind of a technical thing, led to a whole new vision of the universe.

Now, let's not get fooled because lots of contradictions are technical things.

We haven't set up the...

We run into other kinds of contradictions that are technical and they don't seem to, we understood something wrong, we made a mistake, we set up our equations in the wrong way, we didn't translate the formalisms.