Andrew Strominger

I wish so, but I don't think so.

But what I think already has happened and will continue to happen is that there are many different ways that

theorists and observers can interact.

The gold standard is the theorist makes a prediction, the observer measures it and confirms it, or the observer makes a discovery and the theorist explains it.

But there's a lot less than that, which is really kind of the bread and butter of—those are dramatic moments when that happens, right?

Those are once-in-a-lifetime moments when that happens.

But the bread and butter is more when it has already happened, right?

They came to us and said, what is the interesting theoretical things we can understand in this swirl around the black hole?

And we gave an answer.

And then that, in turn, jogged us to...

think about the holographic principle in the context of M87 a little bit differently.

And so it's a useful, and in the same vein, it's useful to talk to the philosophers and it's useful to talk to the mathematicians and, you know, a lot of, you gotta, we just gotta, you know, we don't know where we're going.

The hard part in physics is most problems are either doable, most problems that a theoretical calculation, that a theoretical physicist would do, there's no end of problems

whose answer is uninteresting, can be solved, but the answer is uninteresting.

There's also no end of problems that are very interesting, some of which you've asked me, but we don't have a clue how to solve them.

And when first presented with a problem, almost every problem is one or the other.

It's the jackpot when you find one that isn't one or the other.

Well, I wouldn't describe it as a gray area.

I would describe it as a knife edge.

So it's a very small...