Charles Liu

That's very interesting, Albert, but how are we ever going to figure that out?

And a guy named Arthur Eddington says, I know how we can figure this out.

And organizes an expedition to see a total solar eclipse and take photographs.

And sure enough, he was able to measure with his colleagues that very amount of curvature in space-time that Einstein had predicted.

And so people had been thinking about gravity ever since Newton's time.

And then within that short 10, 15 year period, boom, we figured it out.

But then we had to wait another long period of time to the next thing and the next thing.

Right.

No, yeah, you're completely right, Neil, in what you've said.

The key there, Gary, to sort of circle back to your point, wasn't the eclipse, but it was to use the eclipse as a way to measure the curvature of space and time and thus the motions that are different.

No, Chuck, I feel like that all the time.

It really is amazing how smart all of our predecessors have been.

In many cases, yes.

One of my colleagues right now is doing an amazing kind of theoretical work about quantum information.

When you're trying to send information through, say, fiber optics or something like that,

You lose information because there's noise in the system.

But this guy is like saying, you know what?

I can take that noise and learn, find information in there that we thought was lost and thus make my quantum communications that much better.

It's amazing.

It's like thinking about dust in the solar system and the galaxy, blocking our view of things we want to see, but then turning it around and saying, you know what?