Andrew Strominger

And let me tell you, there's a lot of other things with his illness and with his celebrity and a lot of other things.

I remember him turning down tea with Lady Gaga so we could spend another hour on our paper.

Well, he was one of my great teachers.

Of course, he's older than me, and I was reading his textbooks in graduate school.

And I learned a lot about relativity from him.

I learned about passion for a problem.

I learned about...

not caring what other people think.

Physics is an interesting culture.

Even if you make a great discovery, like Hawking did, people don't believe everything you say.

In fact, people love to disagree.

It's a culture that cherishes disagreement.

And so, you know, he kept ahead with what he believed in and sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong.

I'm well equipped for that.

I, when I started out in graduate school, the problem of quantum gravity was not considered interesting.

I still did it anyway.

I, I'm, I'm a little bit of a contrarian, I guess.

And I think that has, has served me well.

and, uh,

People are always sort of disagreeing with me