is there a part of physics and astronomy
that really confuses you
yeah lots lots of parts of physics and
astronomy really confuse me
quite a lot of it actually
um certainly classical classic things
like
quantum physics very few people have any
kind of intuitive understanding of it
and i certainly wouldn't count myself as
one of them oh many areas
i guess and there are some areas where
if you if it doesn't confuse you that
really just tells you that you haven't
understood it so things like quantum
mechanics and relativity where the
universe really behaves in a completely
counter-intuitive way
if you really think well that's pretty
obvious then i would say that almost
certainly means that you really haven't
understood it and it's only when you're
really confused by it that you're really
getting close to understanding it yeah
how did the universe begin i mean what
happened before the big bang we can
describe very
detailed results of it and make
predictions but what initiated it no
idea
no way to figure it out which bits don't
where do you want me to start i can cope
with a lot of the subjects
uh string theory is way way beyond me
the the difficulty with with with string
theory is that i'm a guest i'm an
experimentalist i really um i do dabble
in theory now and again but what i want
to see is a connection with experiment i
want to see a connection with with
observations
and with string theory sometimes it's
very difficult for me to see where that
that that
connection is i can appreciate to some
extent the elegance of the mathematics
and i can appreciate why string
theorists get so excited they go well
look at the beauty of this look it has
to be right
but just because it's beautiful and just
because it's elegant mathematics doesn't
necessarily make it right so string
theory
and it's it's not frustrating that i
can't figure out how to answer it it's
frustrating that
i don't even know how we can get any
information from there how do we go
about answering that question have no
idea and that's really frustrating
i find i find the idea of quantum
computation very difficult
the i mean
the basic principles i suppose are not
so hard if you're a professional
scientist but how you're going to to set
up the qubits and then manipulate them
and then read out the information on any
useful scale and there's a lot of
optimism about it i guess maybe because
i'm old i'm very skeptical about the
whole thing about how you're going to
actually make a useful machine out of it
but
maybe i'll be proved wrong in 20 years i
find general relativity i i spent one
summer writing notes for myself on
general relativity so at least i had
some understanding but it is beyond me
they they usually to do with interfaces
where you you think you have a little
bit of knowledge on one and a little bit
of knowledge on the other and you so you
you should be able to join the two
together and they don't quite work
so for example uh
in in the field that i i work in i
sometimes overlap with
cosmologists who think about galaxy
formation and the so the onset of what's
gone called going from the linear to the
non-linear regime where you can do
everything nicely on pen and paper
work everything on the linear and then
you know it's not going to it can't keep
doing that gravity takes over and it
becomes non-linear and that interface i
find quite difficult to because i should
be able to do it but i can't quite get
it sorted out thermodynamics i always
struggled with a bit at university yeah
that was that was not one of my best
courses there are lots of things which
are really quite technical which i i can
cope with but when it gets to general
relativity it goes off into another area