Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It does. And so I think this is a good warm-up. The space-time unification- … is a good warm-up as we march through the twentieth century ’cause it gets, in my view at least, weirder and weirder, even with Einstein himself. 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.…

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