Andrew Strominger

So the really beautiful ideas in physics have this very hard to get yourself back into the mindset.

Of course, Einstein was confused about many, many things.

doesn't matter if you're a physicist.

It's not how many things you got wrong.

It's not the ratio of how many you got wrong to how many you got right.

It's the number that you got right.

So Einstein didn't believe black holes existed, even though he predicted them.

And I went and I read that paper, which he wrote, you know, Einstein wrote down his field equations in 1915.

And Schwarzschild solved them and discovered the black hole solution three or four months later in very early 1916.

And 25 years later, Einstein wrote a paper.

So with 25 years to think about what this solution means, wrote a paper in which he said that black holes didn't exist.

And I'm like, whoa.

If one of my students in my general relativity course wrote this, I wouldn't pass them.

Get a C minus.

Okay.

Same thing with gravity waves.

He went back and forth, but he wrote a paper in, I think, 34, saying that gravity waves didn't exist because people were very confused about what a coordinate transformation is.

And in fact, this confusion about what a coordinate transformation is has persisted, and we actually think...

we were on the edge of solving it 100 years later.

Let's imagine I want to draw a map with pictures of all the states and the mountains, and then I want to