Terence Tao

Wiemann had developed Riemannian geometry, which is precisely a theory of spaces that are curved in various general ways, which turned out to be almost exactly what was needed for Einstein's theory.

This is going back to Wiemann's unreasonable effectiveness on mathematics, I think.

The theories that work well to explain the universe tend to also involve the same mathematical objects that work well to solve mathematical problems.

Ultimately, they're just both ways of organizing data in useful ways.

Yeah, that was a leading candidate for many decades.

I think it's slowly falling out of fashion because it's not matching experiment.

what that reality really is like this is why analogies are so important you know i mean so yeah the round earth is not intuitive because we're stuck on it um but you know but you you know but round objects in general we have pretty good intuition a little bit uh and we have interest about light works and so forth and like it's it's actually a good exercise to actually work out how eclipses and phases of the sun and the moon and so forth can be really easily explained by by by round earth and round moon you know um

models.

And you can just take, you know, a basketball and a golf ball and a light source and actually do these things yourself.

So the intuition is there, but you have to transfer it.

Right, yeah.

So modern science is maybe, again, a victim of its own success is that

in order to be more accurate, it has to move further and further away from your initial intuition.

And so, for someone who hasn't gone through the whole process of science education, it looks more and more suspicious because of that.

So, you know, we need more grounding.

I mean, I think, I mean, you know, there are scientists who do excellent outreach, but there's lots of science things that you can do at home.

There's lots of YouTube videos.

I did a YouTube video recently with Grant Sanderson.

We talked about this earlier.

But