Edward Frenkel

We can talk about it later.

But then they ask me what kind of research I do, and I mentioned that I work on the interface of math and quantum physics.

And their eyes light up and say, oh, quantum physics or Einstein's relativity.

I'm really curious about it.

I watched this podcast or I watched that podcast, you know, and I've learned this.

It's like, what do you think about that?

So I actually find that actually physicists are doing a great job educating the public, so to speak, in terms of...

popular books and videos and so on.

Mathematicians are behind.

We're starting to catch up a little bit, have been starting the last 10 years, but we're still behind.

But I think people are curious.

Science is still very much something that people want to learn because that's the best way we know to establish some sort of objective reality, whatever that might be.

Things that we can agree on.

Even though for me, at this point, I always make an argument that our physical theories always change.

They get updated.

So you had Newton's theory of gravity.

Then Einstein's theory superseded it.

But in mathematics...

it seems that theories don't change.

Pythagoras' theorem has been the same for the last 2,500 years.