Andrew Strominger

They might be different in a way that we haven't even thought of.

just different, something that we're not even able to describe now.

We just haven't thought of it, you know?

There surely is.

Well, it's something we know for sure.

I mean, the brain we don't really understand.

And that's got to be some...

Well, they might have discovered different, they might have discovered it differently, and they might have had a different idea of what a proof is.

Right.

Well, so you can know something is true.

First of all, you never know something is true with 100% uncertainty.

I mean, you might have had a blackout.

It's never 100%, right?

You might have had a momentary lapse of consciousness.

It's a key step in the proof, and nobody read it, and whatever.

Okay, so you never know for sure if it's true.

But you can have a preponderance of evidence, which makes it... And preponderance of evidence is not accepted very much in mathematics.

And that was sort of how the famous Ramanujan worked.

He had formulas which he guessed at, and then he...

gathered a preponderance of evidence that you were sure they were true.