Janna Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, there’s an oracle, and you get to talk to that oracle. You can ask multiple questions, but it has to be on that topic. So just clarify, what mystery of the universe would you want that oracle to help you with? It’s funny, I should say the obvious thing, but I almost feel like it would be greedy. I think of a complicated response to this. The obvious thing for me to say would be, I want to understand quantum gravity, or if gravity’s emergent. It’s not even something I work on day to day. I mostly just look with interest at what others are doing, and if I think I can jump in, I would, but I’m not jumping into the fray. But obviously that’s the big one, and there is a sort of sense that, with that will come the answers to all these other things. My complicated relationship is that, well, part of the scientific disposition isn’t having stuff you don’t know the answer to. I mean, we’re not going to have all the answers, I hope, because, then what? It’s sort of dystopian. I totally agree with you. I like the mysteries we have.…

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