Andrew Strominger

Quantum effects become important there.

It's a small thing.

And we don't understand exactly what the theory is, but we know there's no reason to think... Einstein's theory was invented to describe...

weakly curved things, the solar system and so on.

It's incredibly robust that we now see that it works very well near the horizons around black holes and so on.

So it's a good thing that the theory drives itself, that it predicts its own demise.

Newton's gravity had its demise.

There were regimes in which it wasn't valid.

Maxwell's electromagnetism had its demise.

There was regimes in which quantum effects greatly modified the equations.

But general relativity all on its own found

a system which originally was fine would perversely wander off into a configuration in which Einstein's equations no longer applied.

Edges are wonderful because that keeps us in business.

There's no question in my mind, of course, many people would disagree with me,

that now is the most wonderful time to be a physicist.

So people look back at, it's a classical thing to say among physicists, I wish it were 1920.

Right.

quantum mechanics had been just understood.

There was the periodic table.

But in fact, that was such a rich thing that, well, so a lot of exciting stuff happened around 1920.