Shawn Ryan

We're framing it as a fight, man.

Oh, no, I see.

More like, again, this is the type of thing of...

Why do we believe that the laws have to be coming from the same thing?

I think that that's a pretty bold and fun assumption.

And you can imagine that if somebody thought that at every different energy scale, just there's some new things, because that's the way it is, that you couldn't predict, that's a very different vibe than thinking that there's a mathematical consistency or some underlying principles that will carve out a space of theories that still can be consistent with observations.

So what I view it as is, again,

As a hep theorist, we're making this bet about the structure of these laws of nature that probably has some consequences that you wouldn't be able to see when you're just in the nitty-grit of it.

And that excites me a lot, thinking of, OK, if I could zoom out and see the structure of the corpus and which theories are actually consistent with each other, wouldn't that be fun?

And so I think I like that because that feels closer to the kinds of things that excited me about physics as a kid.

Now, it's still further away from a lot of like there's some companies now that are trying to do like AI for physics with a thing of like we're going to like, you know, like robots are going to come out of the physics thing.

It's like I don't.

I it's probably not physics the way I define it when that's the case but there is cool like you can unlock cool things when like you're changing the way you're doing things and I think that I sorry for good for this quantum gravity thing it's again it's about trying to condense this corpus you're trying to like find a single description that can limit to two different things and right now we really have only a limited number of suggestions like roughly string theory is a framework

Can you try to find other ones?

You probably never would if you're just sociologically in a field where everything you're learning is in the context of like within string theory.

It probably would be some variant of it at any point, just almost by accident.

So I think it's kind of fun to do a little bit of a meta layer and think about like what are we actually after as a field and be clear about those goals.

Oh, I love it.

So Perimeter is founded by Mike Lazaridis.

He's one of the co-founders of BlackBerry.