Every human being models the world to understand it and that's cognitively how we're successful.
So I don't look at a chair and see a huge number of molecules or some very complex structure,
I see a chair.
This is something that's very hard to teach a computer to do to understand conceptual
things forward.
And we conceptualize right away.
We theorize right away.
I have a theory of what that object is and my theory is that it's a chair.
And that's what helps human beings be so adaptable in the world and so fast at moving through
the world is precisely this ability to theorize and model.
But we also know that by doing so we are projecting a theory of the world on the world and we
trick ourselves, we deceive ourselves sometimes.
The trick is to use the power that's given to us by being able to conceptualize and model
and have metaphor, but always to remember that that's what we're doing and to always
- when you come to a point there is in some sense no such thing as knowing something's
true.
It's true in the context of the model of the world that you have.
And maybe there's a different model of the world where that truth is a little bit different.
I mean I am in no position to talk about interpersonal relationships, but I think that this is a
problem between people that we have a theory of the world and things mean the certain things
in that context and we forget that somebody else has a different theory of the world and
the exact same experience means something very different.
As a theoretical physicist I rely very much on calculating to understand a result.
So let's say I want to know what happens when a big black hole swallows a little tiny black
hole.
My starting point will be to think what's my first mathematical sentence that I know
if I crack it open will answer this question?
Even with that step can be very hard.
And then once I do that I'll be moving very in a very structured way through the steps
to unlock that, but sometimes It's like a Rubik's Cube, which I'm actually not good
at, some people can just [SOUND] and solve it and some people just keep making a bigger
mess.
And so as a physicist you want your skill to improve to the point where you could just
sort of unlock this thing.
I find it very interesting when I work with much younger students I like to kind of sit
back in the room when you we're calculating now and ask them to try to find the solution
in a way that we do know how to go one step after another, but I'll be trying, at the
same time, to try to find that cute way of unpacking it that's highly non obvious.
And sometimes I'm sitting there for two days while they're generating 12 pages of very
tough beautifully done calculations where I'm trying to find a way to try to do it in
a half a page.
And sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't.
Sometimes I can't do that, it's just not possible or I haven't figured out how to do it.
And sometimes I do.
And when you do it's not just that it's shorter, it's that you're working with such bigger
structures that you can see so much more at a time.
I don't know how else to explain it.
How chess players see a lot of the game at one time in one sort of thought they see many
plays.
It's also why I don't play chess because I see one play at a time.
And I think that's the difference.
It's not just that it's shorter, it's that in some sense you've seen many plays at a
time.
But in terms of the ambiguity, our calculations have to be exact.
We can't be like I'm not really sure it's something like this.
I mean there is an art to approximating, for sure, especially in astrophysics, but the
kind of calculations I tend to do are very precise and there are no approximations and
there's no skipped steps.
But that's not reality.
So everything we've ever looked at in the universe is an approximation.
We only know the number pi to some number of digits.
We don't know every digit in pi, nor will we ever.
And so in some sense pi can't be measured.
It's an abstract thought, but it's not something that can ever exist in reality.
When I tell you the mass of the electron I always have to end at some precision where
I no longer know for sure what the numbers are that follow.
And so in some sense in reality we never have the precision we have in the mathematics on
the page.
And that's an interesting ambiguity to think about.
Do precise numbers exist in reality?
Is there anything whose value is one?
There isn't because the best we can do is say it's close to one at some precision that
we've been able to observe.