Avi Loeb

And he said, you know, this is a crazy enough idea that it might be true.

speaking about naughty ideas.

And then Stephen Hawking heard Bekenstein speak about it, and he said, that's nonsense.

That's nonsense, makes no sense.

I will prove it to be wrong.

So he used quantum mechanics in a curved space-time around a black hole, and lo and behold, he found they emit radiation.

They have a temperature.

They have entropy.

This is the biggest theoretical discovery of Stephen Hawking celebrated for 51 years now.

And he went to disprove Bekenstein and proved him right.

It was considered a crazy idea in the mind of...

the person who benefited most from discovering that Bekenstein was right.

So my point about crazy ideas is... And by the way, over the past 50 years, the mainstream of theoretical physics was obsessed with black hole entropy, trying to use it to figure out a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity.

We don't have that theory, by the way, and that's the reason... If I ever meet an alien scientist, what is the first question I would ask?

It's...

What happened before the Big Bang?

Because it defines our cosmic roots.

But in addition to that, it also will help us figure out how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity because Einstein's gravity breaks down when we go to the Big Bang, when the density of matter and radiation was infinite.

So...

You know, for example, if we knew how the universe started, what ingredients you need to put together, how much heat you want to apply to make our universe, you would have a recipe for making a universe.