Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
9 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“This factor here is less than one. So if I think one second has passed, you think less than one second has passed.”
02 / evaluation
“In other words, the gravitational binding energy of something on the Earth’s surface is quite small in natural units. That’s why we didn’t really notice general relativity on the Earth’s surface until we did very sensitive experiments, because general relativity is in some sense a Taylor expansion in this number, where the relativistic effects, where the first order term is just Newtonian, and then the next order terms will give you the GR corrections to the Newtonian answer.”
03 / evaluation
“It’s responsible for the fact that if you take a feather and a brick in a vacuum chamber and drop them both, they will both fall and hit the ground at the same time. They’ll fall and hit the ground at the same time because even though the force on the brick is much stronger than the force on the feather because it’s heavier, that exactly cancels out the fact that the resistance to acceleration of the brick is larger than the resistance to acceleration of the feather, and they fall exactly at the same rate.”
04 / evaluation
“Conversely, if you have two like charges, they electrostatically repel each other, which is why that’s a minus sign and that’s a plus sign. That means that you cannot do literally the same thing for gravity that you did for electromagnetism, because otherwise, if you did mathematically the same trick, you’d end up with mathematically the same result, which is that you would find that like masses would repel rather than attract.”
05 / evaluation
“If I start off with a mass object of m, I can extract, up to quantum corrections, essentially 100% of the rest mass energy that I’ve gone in with. It is the most efficient possible power plant, because by building an apparatus like this, in principle, I could extract 100% of the energy of whatever I started with.”
06 / evaluation
“If it turns out that there’s an unlimited number of consistent theories, you’re never going to feel your way to the correct answer, because they’re all consistent, and the only tool you have is consistency, and perhaps some notion of aesthetics.”
07 / evaluation
“An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have been made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist. And our view would have said, "No, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it isn't self-adapted to the hole in the ground.”
08 / evaluation
“Then this is a matter of extreme interest, I would say, to us. It won't be relevant for tens of billions of years, probably, because that's the timescale on which the cosmological constant operates.”
09 / evaluation
“In my mind, you need to worry about that less because if you are a mass murderer, it's really not a high expected value strategy to cruise around looking for hitchhikers since there are so few of them.”