Einstein's generalativity is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of history. He was almost a singular genius, right? Like einstein didn't have a lot of competition while he was doing it. But at the same timea, as richard finman famously said, lots of people understood what he had done. And then we come to quantum mechanics, which is a wholly different thing. Why don't you tell us what quantu mechanics is?
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two great triumphs of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Unfortunately, they don't play well together -- despite years of effort, we currently lack a completely successful quantum theory of gravity, although there are some promising ideas out there. Carlo Rovelli is a pioneer of one of those ideas, loop quantum gravity, as well as the bestselling author of such books as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and the recent The Order of Time. We talk about how to make progress on this knotty problem, including whether string theory will play a role (Carlo thinks not). [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/rovelli.mp3" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carlo Rovelli is a professor of theoretical physics at the Centre de Physique Théorique de Luminy of Aix-Marseille University in France. In 1988, he and Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin introduced the idea of loop quantum gravity. He is also the author of the "relational" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Home page Wikipedia page Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Talk on The Physics and Philosophy of Time Twitter Download Episode
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