Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 6prediction 3belief 2uncertainty 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
12 published records
“I think the very first thing that he did was he phoned up the observatory and said, “Can you look at distant stars behind the Sun and measure how light bends as it passes the Sun?” This was the true theorist move, because I think the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory said, “Absolutely not.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In fact, I think I’m going to write down three formulas, three direct consequences of the Schwarzschild metric.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In particular, the force gets so strong when you try to get within this radius, that in fact you cannot slowly lower the brick down towards the surface because you’ve formed a black hole.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“This factor here is less than one. So if I think one second has passed, you think less than one second has passed.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“As you were saying, GR explains or predicts a lot of phenomena. Some we think are correct, some we don’t know are correct.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“You’d find that your feet are being attracted to the black hole much more vigorously than your head is, because they’re closer, and you end up getting stretched.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don’t know that we’re going to be able to keep up entirely, but I think we’ll keep up much better than pessimistic forecasts would suggest.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast