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===== Physics in the 21st Century ===== | ===== Physics in the 21st Century ===== | ||
<p>[00:41:47] What is physics to physicists today? How do they see it different from the way in which we might imagine the lay person sees physics? [[Ed Witten]] was asked this question in a talk he gave on physics and geometry many years ago, and he pointed us to three fundamental insights, which were his big three insights in physics. | <p>[00:41:47] What is physics to physicists today? How do they see it different from the way in which we might imagine the lay person sees physics? [[Edward Witten|Ed Witten]] was asked this question in a talk he gave on physics and geometry many years ago, and he pointed us to three fundamental insights, which were his big three insights in physics. | ||
<p>[00:42:13] And they correspond to the three great equations. So the first one is, is that somehow physics takes place in an arena and that arena is a [[manifold]] $$X$$ together with some kind of [[semi-Riemannian]] [[metric structure]], something that allows us to take length and angle. So that we can perform measurements at every point in this space-time or higher-dimensional structure, leaving us a little bit of head room. The equation most associated with this is the [[Einstein field equation]]. | <p>[00:42:13] And they correspond to the three great equations. So the first one is, is that somehow physics takes place in an arena and that arena is a [[manifold]] $$X$$ together with some kind of [[semi-Riemannian]] [[metric structure]], something that allows us to take length and angle. So that we can perform measurements at every point in this space-time or higher-dimensional structure, leaving us a little bit of head room. The equation most associated with this is the [[Einstein field equation]]. |