General relativity from first principles – Adam Brown

Adam Brown is back! General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in this episode, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol. At the core of general relativity, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists acceleration and the mass that gravity pulls on just happen to be exactly the same. Adam then leads us through the path of insight which Einstein called his “happiest thought.” Then Adam lectures on black holes. First, by showing how even under special relativity you could create a perpetual motion machine if black holes weren’t truly black. And then, by explaining why the observations of an infalling observer and a distant bystander to the black hole would be so radically different Adam leads Blueshift, the team at Google DeepMind cracking science and reasoning, which gave us the opportunity to discuss at the very end how close we are to AIs that could rediscover general relativity from scratch. Stay till the close for some philosophy of science. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Jane Street has traders from all sorts of different backgrounds. For example, I recently got to speak with Jed Thompson, a trader who started his career in particle physics. Jed told me how the habits he built as a physicist (like never running a calculation without first having a good guess at the answer) helped him build good trading intuition. So no matter what field you’re working in right now, your experience may be more applicable than you think. Check out open positions at https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh • Crusoe gave me early access to their new serverless fine-tuning product, so I decided to try fine-tuning a Dwarkesh-style question generator. Crusoe made this really easy: I just tu