Lisa Randall: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think about the successes and the failures of string theory? To what degree do you think it succeeded, to what degrees it not succeeded yet or has failed? I think to talk about any science in terms of success and failure often misses the point because there’s not some absolute thing. I do think that string theorists were a bit overly ambitious… Not overly ambitious, but a little bit overly arrogant in the beginning, thinking they could solve many problems that they weren’t going to solve. That’s not to say the methods and advances in strength theory don’t exist, but they certainly weren’t able to immediately solve all the problems they thought they could solve. It has given us tools, it has given us some insights, but it becomes almost a sociological question of how much it should be one or the other. I do think that you can get caught up in the problems themselves, and sometimes you can get caught up in the methods and just do other examples. The real physics insights often come from people who are thinking about physics as well as math. Because you mentioned AI, is there hope that AI might be able to help find some interesting insights? Another way to ask this question is how special are humans that we’re able to discover novel insights about the world?…

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