Shawn Ryan

And it's kind of missing the point that like, okay, so say you defunded like this subfield, who's going to actually know quantum field theory amongst the people who are doing data-driven stuff that doesn't like, you know, that's making progress now.

So it's like, how do you take advantage of the fact that like, there are things that are worth funding that are not necessarily...

like worth funding because they make money or because they have a product and then try to align it in like a kind of maybe not corporate structure or something where you make it so that it doesn't need to rely on things like always having been that way.

Can you innovate in that space of trying to fund or have self-fund valuable enterprises that are not driven by profit, but driven by the thing that they're after?

So whether it's space exploration or like solving physics or something like that, I'm inspired by that a lot.

I mean, I hope we can do it.

No, I don't know.

See, the thing is right now, it's this funny, we're at an interesting time where I think the technologies that everybody cares about, AI, whatnot, really can help doing the job that I do.

There's a thing of I don't know how to make the right pitch for somebody who believes it's going to do everything.

and also conveying what exactly it means to solve physics or not.

So in practice, I do think there's a sense in which we're trying to axiomatize these laws of nature, and maybe there is some uniqueness or rigidity to that structure that it can find.

But I think that a lot of people think, oh, there's a particular open problem, and it's going to write a paper that the researchers are going to be like, whoa, this is better, and that's what physics research is.

So I'm scared of...

not having a good collaboration, say, with the industry folks and the academic folks to really kind of pin down, okay, say you can accelerate science.

Did you finish it?

Or did you now open up a new chance to build more infrastructure for how that knowledge is stored and related to one another?

Because we don't just want to answer about it.

I think that if I was an engineer, I want to know the answer to this math equation to predict what I would need for my engineering problem.

Versus for physics, it's more like, okay, here's the answers, but why?

And really just distilling that, kind of compressing that