Janna Levin: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay, so you’re able to walk away? I am absolutely able to say, “Oh, that’s just not…” I mean, I’m not going to deny that sometimes I maybe take a while to come to that conclusion, longer than I should, but I will. I absolutely will. I will drop it. Any self-respecting physicist should be able to do that. The problem is with somebody like Andrew Wiles, you were describing, who to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, it took him seven years. Was that the number? Something like that. He went up into his mother’s attic or something, and did not emerge for seven years, is that maybe he did. He was on the right track. He wasn’t wrong, so it could have been interminable. He still might not have gotten there in the end. And so, that’s the really difficult space to be in, where you’re not wrong, you are onto something, but it’s just asymptotically approaching that solution, and you’re never actually going to land it. That happens. It would break me, straight up break me. He had a proof.…

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