Posted: Jul 25, 2021 2:15 am
TopCat wrote:Usually I have a reasonable understanding of most of what he talks about with his guests but in this case although I had an illusion of comprehension for the first few minutes, after that I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Individually I knew most of the words but in the order they came, they could as well have been gibberish. It was quite humbling.
You get used to that and just as you're starting to accept that that's just the way of things, something clicks. Learning physics in such an osmotic way is a bit like playing chess. You have to see the game you don't understand to understand the game you can see, if that makes sense.
My experience has been that, most often, reading the books isn't what ed to the understanding, it' the discussion with people who understand it.
Sean Carroll seemed to understand it though, from some of his comments, unless he was faking it, which I'd doubt. It was also much longer than most of his Mindscape episodes, other than the AMAs, so I guess he found it genuinely interesting.
This is unsurprising to me. I don't get easily excited. There's something about this that appeals to me. It's hyper-elegant, and it resolves the biggest problem in physics without having to fill in the gap.
It's almost too good to be true...