Sean Carroll: belief

Transcript context

…If we figure out a lot, millions of years from now about black holes, how surprised would you be if they traveled back in time and told you everything you want to know about black holes? How much do you think there is still to know, and how mind-blowing would it be? It does depend on what they would say. I think that there are colleagues of mine who think that we’re pretty close to figuring out how information gets out of black holes, how to quantize gravity, things like that. I’m more skeptical that we are pretty close. I think that there’s room for a bunch of surprises to come. So in that sense, I suspect I would be surprised. The biggest and most interesting surprise to me would if quantum mechanics itself were somehow superseded by something better. As far as I know, there’s no empirical evidence-based reason to think that quantum mechanics is not 100% correct, but it might not be. That’s always possible, and there are, again, respectable friends of mine who speculate about it. So that’s the first thing I’d want to know. Oh, so the black hole would be the most clear illustration-…

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