Daniel Whiteson

It requires cleverness.

Sometimes people think all the smart guys are in theory, right?

But the experimentalists have a different kind of cleverness because they have to force the universe to reveal the answers.

You can't just sit on a rock and, like, think your way to understanding the universe.

The Greeks tried that, right?

They didn't make a lot of progress.

You got to force the universe to reveal it, which means coming up with clever situations where...

If the answer is A or B, you'll get a different outcome, right?

That's the whole idea of experimental physics.

It's like, how do we force the universe to show us?

But we're limited with our tools, right?

And the frustrating thing about understanding general relativity and quantum mechanics is that mostly it's hard to bring them near each other.

So if we could see inside a black hole, we would know the answer to how do you unify general relativity and quantum gravity and quantum mechanics.

We can't see inside a black hole, too bad.

If we could see the early universe, we could as well, because the early universe had a stage where things were denser than the Planck scale.

The Planck scale you can express as a distance or as a temperature.

And so things were hotter than the Planck temperature.

And a time as well, yeah?

Yeah, absolutely.

So when you say the early universe,