Daniel Whiteson

A hundred years earlier.

And that would have changed the whole course of human history and our understanding of the nature of reality, right?

And that tells you that like a lot of the ways that we discover the universe are based on happenstance, who happened to be in the right place at the right time and had the right idea or were paying attention at the right moment.

There's often these times when you discover something and then you think, wait a second, if that's true, couldn't we have discovered this earlier?

And then you go back and you find the original data.

You're like, oh yeah, look, there it is.

There's the data.

They just didn't realize it, you know?

For example, Galileo discovered Neptune, and he didn't even know it.

And you can go back and look in his logbooks, and there is Neptune in his beautiful drawing with his own handwriting.

Like, oh, that's Neptune.

He should have noticed.

But it took hundreds of years before other people figured out Neptune was there and it was a thing.

Um, and that tells you that probably right now there is enough data, there's evidence for some crazy new discovery we haven't made yet in experiments we've already done.

We just haven't figured it out yet.

And in a hundred years, somebody is going to look back and be like, Daniel, you could have won a Nobel prize if you had understood what you had.

Right.

But it's hard when you're standing at the forefront of human ignorance to know like, where do I go?

Where do I look?

How do I figure this out?