Terence Tao

And sometimes you're surprised, sometimes your initial guess is wrong, and actually the answer is the opposite of what you thought it is.

Come on.

I'm not going.

Yeah, you can sometimes feel that these problems have agency and sometimes some malice in some cases.

Malice?

Ooh, ooh.

You have another one?

I believe so.

Yeah, so the math we have has become extremely good at explaining most of the universe.

So as long as you're not at extremely very tiny scales and extremely high temperatures or like a black hole, like the rest of the universe, the math checks out.

We can make measurements of galaxies a billion light years away and all the measurements line up with what our current cosmological models give us.

the math works.

But yeah, there are some, the early universe and the center of black holes, the current math is not giving us answers that make sense.

In physics, I think that the biggest problem is that we don't have a theory of quantum gravity, which is the theory that would govern extremely strong gravitational fields at extremely small scales.

I think the current theory is that we have to abandon our notions of space and time.

Even non-Euclidean geometry will not be enough to understand what quantum space-time looks like.

And Lippin proposed string theory is the most famous, but nothing has really stuck as being convincingly the answer.

Yeah, he's had a lot of ideas.

Unfortunately, there was some string theory has a very pretty math, but it doesn't seem to be fitting reality as much as a string theory as I'd hoped.

So sometimes even if the math is pretty, it's not the right answer.