Shawn Ryan

Sean.

Thank you for having me.

No, I mean, it's just not accurate.

But I do like this notion of, I don't know, thinking a bit about what that legacy is and our field as a whole and how do we kind of leverage that or do good with it.

Most literally, yeah.

The thing that I study is that.

And I do find it's fun to kind of take a step back and talk to people who are not researchers to see how they interpret the words that we attach to things or how visceral, literal, the researcher versus the person you're talking to takes it.

Absolutely.

I think I probably benefit from it too much, and that's a bad thing.

Oh, so quantum information or the sense in which you might be thinking of if you were talking to someone who does quantum computing and those facets is more like in holography, there are definitely connections between foundational aspects of entanglement and different protocols you can do in a quantum mechanical system and then mapping it to a gravitational one.

So string theory is not related to that directly, but there's a sense in which the research I do probably is

more closely related, if that's what you're asking.

But basically, the whole point is we want to try to, as a field, not individually, understand what the basic rules are, what are the laws of nature.

And if you aren't going out and measuring things, what do you really have at your disposal?

You're roughly trying to use mathematical consistency of your frameworks to try to piece together a picture.

And so if you have rules for the very short distance physics and very long distance physics that are kind of

in their own worlds, and you want to try to have a framework that connects both of them, you run into various problems.

And string theory is one example of a route that people have found to kind of avoid the pitfalls of understanding how to have a graviton or how to have a quantum mechanical system with gravity.

But in practice, you're roughly setting one little facet of these mathematical frameworks and trying to push it pretty far or generalize it to different situations.

Yes.