349 | Daniel Harlow on What Quantum Gravity Teaches Us About Quantum Mechanics

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Many of us have heard the story of Albert Einstein, who in 1905 had his miraculous year, where he wrote these wonderful papers about special relativity, quantum mechanics, Brownian motion and atoms, things like that. But then it was ten years later, in 1915, that he put forward the general theory of relativity, the theory of space-time being curved, and that's what gravity is, etc.

So the idea being that the smartest physicist of the 20th century had about 10 years of really hard work and he came up with this earth-shattering theory that changed our views of space and time and the universe. And it wasn't even continuous work. Einstein wrote a lot of papers on other topics during those 10 years. But that precedent kind of gives us an expectation, right? Like if that smart a person can take that long time, 10 years, pretty long time, then we shouldn't take too much longer to make huge progress ourselves in the most difficult questions we have.

After all, maybe we're not as smart as Einstein, but if all of us in physics are working together on something, or many people are, progress should be kind of tangibly fast. You should see more improvements, more theories that really change things. Of course I'm saying all this because that doesn't seem to be the case these days in fundamental physics. Famously we have the standard model of particle physics for which the finishing touches were put on in the 1970s, maybe the 1980s.

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