Daniel Whiteson

Because I've heard you say that we only understand 5% of physics.

I don't know if every physicist likes that number.

But in that 95%, is unified field theory in there?

I mean, do your gut...

Yeah, so there's a couple of questions there.

I think that almost every physicist sees that the same way, but there's often a gap between the way physicists see their work and the way the public understands it.

You know, the way like mass is misunderstood and black holes are misunderstood.

The Big Bang is widely misunderstood and misexplained.

So I think that almost every physicist would agree with me that the Planck scale is not a fundamental limit to our possibility of understanding.

I think that's pretty widely understood inside physics, though in popular science it's not often described that way.

And it frustrates me that there's this gap between what physics has revealed about the universe and how scientists think about and talk about it, and how it's described and understood in popular science.

And that's unfortunate because I want people to know what is the real story?

What are scientists thinking?

And I respect that sometimes that has to be translated and sometimes those translations go wrong for good reasons and good intentions.

Absolutely.

It's hard to translate it.

But when there's that persistent gap, I feel like that's unfortunate because people are being not intentionally misled, but they're misunderstanding what we know and what we don't.

That's why I encourage everybody to check out your podcast because you and Kelly do a great job of making this accessible.

It's also super fun.

Like, you guys are funny.