Transcription
One of the greatest physicists alive spent years chasing the wrong answer about the big bang.
What do you think of that attempt? Well, I used to think that. I thought, well, it it's got to be quantum gravity, but since you got to have something extremely asymmetrical in time. So maybe quantum gravity is a very peculiar theory which is asymmetrical in time. And I went through several years of my life thinking that and then I changed my mind. That's not the answer.
[laughter]
But I did that was my sort of solution. The quantum gravity had to be a very peculiar time asymmetrical theory and big bang was a quantum gravity which had this funny I say had to be time asymmetrical because the big bang were so very special and all the singularities in black holes and all are very very general. They're completely different. The ones in black holes would be very complicated with this informal curve which you're going to infinity get going completely wild and these Russians worked out what they might be looked looked at look like and so on. No, I accepted all that. Nothing like what the big bang was like. So there's something very peculiar about the big bangs. Not like any old singularity. That's right. Because probably the most fashionable approaches at the moment are to so approaches like so-called emergent spacetime where you essentially picture quantum mechanics as the base framework and you attempt to uh see how spacetime would emerge from some underlying theory. It could be a network of cubits or whatever it is.
Eventually I lived out of that phase. Did you because that's what most not most maybe but many physicists would would say today certainly with work on black holes and the black hole information paradox and so on. So why did you why did you uh what do you say grow out of it? I think the thing was to realize it was not a quantum gravity problem. That's the thing you see because it doesn't I mean if it were you wouldn't get this huge asymmetry and it's in your in your face. It's not a subtlety it completely in your face. But my sort of solution was to think that quantum gravity is a very strange theory which is time asymmetrical. Well I eventually lived out of that phase my life and thinking no no that's not the answer. So my my answer is something which people still have trouble believing in.