Daniel Whiteson

it would mean that that generation of thinkers, Einstein and those guys, they would have grown up in a quantum world.

So when Einstein was learning science and when he was becoming a physicist, he lived in a classical world, right?

Things were deterministic.

Particles had trajectories.

There was a location and a velocity to everything.

And that's the way he thought.

So his theory of general relativity is a classical one in that sense.

Classical is a funny word because sometimes we mean it to say like original.

And so he overthrew Newton, which is sort of classical gravity.

But his theory is classical in a quantum sense in that it insists that everything has a location and a time.

And that's the challenge for us now is to bring his gravity together with quantum mechanics.

But imagine...

if he had grown up in a quantum world where thinking in quantum mechanics was like not a new thing.

Maybe he was fluent in quantum mechanics.

Would he have developed general relativity?

Would he have built a classical theory of gravity or would he have already built a quantum theory of gravity?

I mean, maybe the whole reason we're at this impasse is because we have these two different thrusts.

Einstein gives us relativity and, you know, Bohr and Schrodinger give us quantum mechanics and they started from different places and we can't reconcile them.

maybe if einstein had been you know quantum einstein he would have taken a different path and developed a different theory of relativity or gravity which was quantum in quantum compatible right so this whole hundred years of frustration we've had trying to bring these things together maybe we could have avoided that if a hundred years before becquerel somebody had left uranium salts on a photographic yes that's all it would take

Oh, that leads me to something I really wanted to talk to you about.