Lisa Randall: observation

Transcript context

…Would you say the truly big leaps happened top-down? Like Einstein? Einstein was not a top-down person in the beginning. Special relativity was very much him thinking about… They were thought experiments, but he was very much… The original theory about relativity is something like on the nature of electromagnetism. He was trying to understand how Maxwell’s laws could make sense when they seemed to have different symmetries than what we had thought they were. He was very much a bottom-up person, and in fact, he resisted top-down for a long time. Then when he tried to do the theory of general relativity or the general theory of relativity, whichever you want to call it, incorporating gravity into the system when you need some feedback, then he was helped by a mathematician who had developed some differential geometry and helped him figure out how to write down that. After that, he thought top-down was the way to go, but he actually didn’t make that much progress. I think it’s naive to think it was just one or the other. In fact, a lot of people who made real progress were rooted in actual measurements. Speaking of mathematicians, what do you is the difference, you’ve had a bit of foot in both, between physics and mathematics in the way it helps us understand the world?…

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