How to Think About Science, Right?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There was no absolute, rock hard prediction either way. But had you seen super symmetry, your credence and string theory would have crept up a little bit exactly. The more sot of good, indirect things happen, the more our credibility goes up. There's also a lot of attention now in doing toward doing experiments quantom gravity.

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.