Andrew Strominger

Why should it have hid itself from us?

Why shouldn't there be enough of it to substantially curve the space between us and the moon?

Why did there have to be such a small amount that only the crazy best astronomers in the world could find it?

So fast.

Well, the speed of light is a funny one because you could always choose units

in which the speed of light is one.

You know, we measure it in kilometers per second and it's 186,000 or miles per second.

It's 186,000 miles per second.

But if we had used different units, then we could make it one.

But you can make dimensionless ratios.

So, you know, you could say, why is the time scale set by the expansion of the universe so large compared to the time scale of a human life or so large compared to the time scale for a neutron to decay?

Absolutely.

Well, that is one of the...

a little off the track here, but that certainly is one of the nice things about being a physicist is you spend a lot of time thinking about insides of black holes and billions of years in the future, and it sort of gets you away from the day-to-day into another fantastic realm.

But I was answering your question about how there could be information in a black hole.

So Einstein only gave us an approximate description, and we now have a theory that corrects it, string theory.

And now sort of was the moment of truth.

Well, when we first discovered string theory, we knew from the get-go that string theory would correct what Einstein said, just like Einstein corrected what Newton said.

But we didn't understand it well enough

to actually compute the correction, to compute how many gigabytes there were.