Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, let me give you an even more basic example, sodium and chloride. Sodium is an explosive metal. You put it in water and it’s kind of neat. You put it in water, and it just, it doesn’t quite explode, but it gets hot, and it pops around. Chlorine, it’s a gas. It’s going to kill you. So these two things are deadly. They’re awful. And yet when you mix them, you put it on your food at night. It’s salt, right? And so this is a case where this whole, A, unification and B, this deeper understanding, in this case of chemistry, of how two things that are dangerous can be brought together and turned into something not only innocuous, but necessary for human life. And so this is not unusual, what you’re describing. I mean, when you think about it, forget about everything else, just the fact that, you know, we tell little kids that the world is made of atoms. Now, that’s crazy. Most people have never seen atoms, and yet nobody really doubts it anymore. And I think it’s just a case of familiarity, and then the culture slowly accepts it, and it’s then, it’s real even without the evidence. In fact, one of the courses you described there how we know what we know, I think that’s a valid question. How do we know there are atoms? And of course, there are ways we do. And by the way, on that front, I would love to go through how we know the building blocks in the universe as we march towards quarks. That, in the course that you mentioned, is one of the most fascinating things of this philosophy of atoms being around for a very long time. Then you concretize and you actually can prove or have strong observations that indicate that there is atoms, and then there is a nucleus, there is electrons, there is photons, there is quarks, and I mean, it gets weirder and weirder, and now we’re facing the mystery is there’s building blocks even smaller than that. But anyway, Einstein, turns out, didn’t just do special relativity. By the way, I really think he deserves three Nobel Prizes. He got it for photoelectric effect. The fact that he didn’t get it for general relativity is a crime against humanity. I don’t understand. Obviously should have gotten it for general relativity and special relativity. I mean, I think special relativity is separate from general relativity in terms as far as Nobel Prizes go. So general relativity is another unification. Yes, that’s right. What Einstein realized was that if you were in a rocket ship and the rocket ship was a very quiet rocket ship and it was accelerating, it would feel like you were experiencing gravity. And so as you say, it’s one of his happiest moments when he realized that acceleration and gravity feel very much the same. What I’m impressed by is that idea, which is already a pretty neat idea, somehow led him to take his space-time idea, take this acceleration gravity idea, and realize that he could describe gravity as the bending of space-time. Space-time being constant like east, west, north, south, that’s already hard enough. But now he’s saying, “Well, you know, take your map and crinkle it and bend it,” and so forth, and that’s gravity. That is a staggering, mind-blowing idea.…

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