Terence Tao

And trying to use Cartesian coordinates X, Y, Z, it's a non-starter.

But we don't know what to replace it with.

We don't actually have the mathematical concepts.

The analog of Hamiltonian that sort of organized everything.

I believe so.

I mean, the history of physics has been that of unification.

much like mathematics over the years.

Electricity and magnetism were separate theories, and then Maxwell unified them.

Newton unified the motions of the heavens for the motions of objects on the Earth and so forth.

So it should happen.

It's just that the... Again, to go back to this model of observations and theory...

Part of our problem is that physics is a victim of its own success.

Our two big theories of physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, are so good now that together they cover 99.9% of all the observations we can make.

You have to either go to extremely insane particle accelerations or the early universe or things that are really hard to measure in order to get any deviation from either of these two theories.

to the point where you can actually figure out how to combine them together.

But I have faith that we've been doing this for centuries.

We've made progress before.

What often happens is that when the physicists need some theory of mathematics, there's often some precursor that the mathematicians worked out earlier.

When Einstein started realizing that space was curved, he went to some mathematician and asked, is there some theory of curved space that mathematicians already came up with that could be useful?

He said, oh yeah, I think Riemann came up with something