YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Nielsen

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-04-07
most recent: 2026-04-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Think about Chenison walking along. We know almost nothing about these proteins, and yet the tiny few facts we do know are just incredible. The ribosome. Another example, I mean, this miraculous sort of device.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And no doubt there's hundreds of millions of proteins known. So it is a little bit like that. We've been gifted by biology, just this immense library of machines, no doubt containing an enormous number of very interesting ideas. And we're just at the very, very, very beginning of understanding it. So actually, I mean, that's, I suppose, kind of your point, actually, is I need to relabel your argument slightly, but you sort of think of that as a gift from an alien civilization, which obviously it isn't, but you think of it that way. And it's like, oh my goodness, like there's so much in there, and we're going to study it. And goodness knows how long we could continue to study it. There's tens of thousands of papers about hemoglobin and things like that. And we still don't understand them. And yet we're getting so much out of it. Just think about insulin alone.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third experiment I like to think about is sort of GitHub but for aliens. So somebody presents you with all of the code from some alien civilization. And I mean, I don't even know what code means there, but their specification of algorithms. And it's so interesting, it would have many interesting new ideas in there. And it would take forever for human beings to dig through and to try and extract all of those. One reason, I mean, the origin of this for me was actually thinking about proteins in nature. We've been gifted just this incredible variety of machines, which we don't understand really at all, and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a one-by-one basis. We're still understanding hemoglobin and insulin and things like this.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Sort of, there's a question of what's actually hard. If it's a question of if it's just the ideas, well, those spread relatively quickly. It's relatively easy to share ideas. If it's something more, it's almost sort of a Dan Wang kind of an idea where it's actually sort of, there's some notion of capacity. You need all the right text. You need all of the right manufacturing capacity and so on. And so Civilization A has very different kind of manufacturing capacity and it's just not so easy to build in civilization B, even if civilization B is kind of ahead, then I think that becomes true. There is actually comparative advantage, which is really worth going to provide massive benefits to trade in both directions. Eventually, you're going to expect some diffusion of innovation. It is funny to think about what the barriers are there.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a consequence of sort of the architecture of attention, right? At any given time, there's always a most successful thing. Maybe if deep learning wasn't a thing, maybe you'd be talking about CRISPR. Maybe you'd be talking about whatever it is. Maybe we wouldn't think about solving sort of the protein structure prediction problem as really a success of AI maybe we would have figured out how to do it with sort of curve fitting like you know more broadly construed and we'd just be like oh wow like we took a lot of computing resources but but protein structure prediction might you know be an enormously important thing so there is always Sort of our biggest thing. And I think what you're pointing at is more a consequence of the way in which attention gets centralized.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand, I'm not sure anybody understands very well the dynamics of that, like how to think about why the structure of knowledge is that way, that these new fields keep opening up, but it does seem empirically at least to be the case.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a very static snapshot in time of scientific progress, maybe there's some truth to that. But if somebody is standing behind the dessert table and is replenishing, restocking the desserts and keeps kind of adding new ones in, it may turn out that a little bit later, much better desserts appear. What was there? And this has been the case over and over and over again sort of new fields arrive and all of a sudden boom, it's actually easy to make progress again. Young people flood in because you can be 21 and make major breakthroughs rather than having to spend 25 years mastering everything that's been done before. It's obviously very attractive. And I don't...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, I think it's worth thinking about why do you expect diminishing returns and how well does that argument actually apply in practice? And an analogy I like is actually thinking about sort of going to some event, going to a wedding or whatever, and you go to the dessert buffet, and they've put out 30 desserts. And of course, naturally what people do, right, the best desserts go first. I mean, we don't quite have a well-ordered preference there, so maybe there's some difference. But human beings are fairly similar. So the best desserts will go first. And this is an argument for why you expect diminishing returns in a lot of different fields if it's relatively easy to see what's available and people have similar preferences, then the best stuff goes first and it just gets sort of worse and worse after that.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean A very common argument here is sort of the low hanging fruit argument, the argument that says, oh, there should be diminishing returns”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Numbers. Numbers. Yeah, yeah. Of all of the intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy, maybe that number is one. Actually, arguably we've already increased the number. Of all of those, what fraction of the concept of counting? And it does seem... Very natural. What fraction have discovered the idea of some kind of decimal place system? Interesting question And maybe we're missing something really simple and obvious that's actually way better than that. What Fraction got there immediately? What fraction sort of had to go through some other intermediate state? What fraction use linear representations versus a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional representation? I think the answers to these questions are just not at all obvious. It's a lot of design freedom.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the long term future? As you get higher and higher up in the tech tree, choices about which direction we go and sort of how we choose to explore, I think it's potentially the case that different civilizations or different choices mean that we end up in different parts of that tree. And in particular, just things, I mean, sort of very basic things about We're very visual creatures, certain other animals are much more orally based. Does that bias sort of the types of thoughts that you have? And then you extend it to sort of much more exotic kinds of civilizations where maybe just sort of their biases in terms of how they perceive and how they manipulate the world are maybe quite different than ours. And that might make some significant changes in terms of how they do that exploration of the tech tree. Speculation, obviously.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, my expectation is that different. There will be different. But what do we look like another million years in the future in terms of all of the different ideas which people have had around how to manipulate computers, how to manipulate information, I think we're likely to discover that actually there are a lot of very deep ideas still to be discovered. It's a nice, who was it? I think it was Knuth in the preface to the art of computer programming says something like, you know, he started this book back in the 60s and he talked to a mathematician. It was a bit contemptuous and said, look, computer science isn't really a thing yet. Come back to me when there's a thousand deep theorems. And Knuth remarks, and he's writing this now decades later, the preface, there clearly are a thousand dib theorems now. And that means it's really interesting to sort of think.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For physics, and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is not true at all. If you think about computer science, computer science basically got started in the 1930s when Turing and Church and so on just laid down what the theory of everything was. They just said, you know, here's how computation works. And then we've spent 90-odd years since then just exploring consequences of that and gradually building up more and more interesting ideas. And those ideas are, to some extent, you can just regard as technology, but to some extent, insofar as they're sort of discovered principles inside that theory of computation, I think they're best regarded as science and in some cases very fundamental science. Ideas like public key cryptography are, I mean, they're just incredibly deep, very non-obvious ideas, which in some sense lay hidden already sort of in the 19th century.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think probably the idea there that I'm at least somewhat attached to is the idea that the tech tree or the science and tech tree is probably much larger than we realize. I mean, we're sort of in this funny situation. People will sometimes talk about a theory of everything as a potential goal for...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do wonder where is the bottleneck going to move to? So certainly one thing that a lot of them seem to be bottlenecked on is now having interesting ideas and in particular having interesting design ideas. So there's not really a verification loop for knowing, oh, that design idea is very interesting. So they're no longer nearly as bottlenecked by their ability to produce code, but they are still bottlenecked by this other thing. They always formally, they weren't bottlenecked on it because just writing code took so much of their time, they could sort of have lots of ideas while they take three weeks to implement their prototype and then they would implement the next version. Now they're taking three hours to implement the prototype and they don't have as good ideas sort of after that from a design point of view.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That doesn't mean though, as you're saying, that it's necessarily going to help with all kinds of bottlenecks. And sort of, I suppose the question you're pointing out is, what are the types of bottlenecks that remain and what are the prospects for getting past them? I think even in the case of coding, like it's really interesting, talking to programmer friends at the moment, they're all in this state of shock and high excitement and they're all over the place actually kind of talking to them.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the question is where is the bottleneck at some level? And sort of, you know. Are we primarily bottlenecked on one thing or one type of thing, or are we bottlenecked on sort of multiple types of thing? So certainly talking to structural biology people, they seem to think that AlphaFold was an enormous advance. It was a shock. So at some level, yes, AI, it seems certain it can help us speed up science. So it is helping with a certain type of bottleneck.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of these. It's funny too. The way we tell the history of science, it sounds so simple. Like, oh, you just focus on the right exception and you realize that you need to throw out the old theory. And lo and behold, your Nobel Prize awaits. But in fact, these exceptions are all over the place. And 99.9% of the time, it just turns out to be some effect like this thermal acceleration in the case of the pioneer spacecraft. So, you know, sort of selection.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this happens over and over, right? There's just so many stories which are exactly like this. I mean, an example I love from the 1990s, some people noticed that the pioneer spacecraft weren't quite where they were supposed to be. And so you can get very excited about this. Oh, my goodness, general relativity is wrong. We have maybe we're going to discover the next theory of gravity. Today, the accepted explanation is that, no, actually, there's just displayed asymmetry in the spacecraft. It turns out that the thermal radiation is slightly larger in one direction than the other, and that's causing a tiny little acceleration towards the sun. And most of the time, when there's these apparent exceptions, it's just something like that's going on. It's very much like the Mercury Vulcan case. But every once in a while, it's not. And A priori, you can't distinguish these. But science is just full.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think, I mean, a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do, and you actually need to do both. And so, I mean, this is certainly very true in the history of science that this kind of diversity where you just have lots of people go off and pursue lots of potentially promising ideas, you just need to support that for a long time. It's hard to do that for a variety of reasons, but it does seem to be very, very, very important.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's like this point that you make about sort of keeping all the different research programs alive. That, I think, is very important and somehow central. I mean, a great example is situations where the same answer has been correct in some circumstances and wrong in other circumstances. The planet Uranus was not in quite the right spot and people very famously predicted the existence of Neptune on this basis. Wonderful, massive success for Newtonian gravity. The planet Mercury is not in quite the right spot. You predict the existence of some other distorting planet. Turns out that doesn't exist actually. The reason Mercury is not in the right spot is because you need general relativity. And so you've sort of pursued very similar ideas and it's been very successful in one.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient, you need something new, and then you're going to, yeah, you're just going to start by doing the simplest possible stuff. And it just turns out that a lot of that stuff doesn't work very well. And so you sort of forced, in fact, it is interesting, he's sort of forced to go through these steps of gradually it gets quite more complicated and it's sort of wrong in a variety of ways. And the final theory appears really shockingly simple and beautiful, but it's gone through some somewhat ugly intermediate stages.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, okay, so you think about the example of going from Newtonian gravity to Einstein's general theory of relativity. And these are shockingly different theories. And the question is, what causes that flip? And as nearly as I understand the history, what goes on is Einstein develops special relativity. And pretty much straight away, he understands, I mean, it's a very obvious observation. In special relativity, influences can't propagate faster than the sea to light. And in Newtonian gravity, action is at a distance. In fact, it's straight away in special relativity. You could use Newtonian gravity to do faster than light signaling. You could send information backwards in time. You could do all kinds of crazy stuff. And so it's not a big leap to realize, oh, we have a big problem here. And so that's kind of the forcing function there.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, this is sort of to my point that we don't really understand what to do with the models like we don't have the verbs necessarily yet. But it is certainly interesting to think about the question where you start to apply constraints to the models essentially saying what's the simplest possible explanation? Or can you simplify? Can you give me sort of the 90-10 explanation? Can you go further and further and further in boiling it down? So it might be that indeed they sort of start out by providing a very, very complicated, many, many, many parameter model. But you can just force the case and basically that's scaffolding, which maybe they're sort of the very early days of their attempt to understand something. But they're forced through that to a much more simple understanding.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I sort of wonder if there's going to be something similar to happen in this particular case where you can take these models and sort of just use them in a little bit the same way people do with mathematica and take them seriously as they're not explanations in the classic sense, but there'll be something else which interesting operations can be done on.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anticipation of this in some sense, I think, in the way, something I know some mathematicians and physicists who, I mean, historically, if you had like a 100-page equation, which, and that's the kind of thing that does come up, I mean, there's just nothing you can do if it's 1920. There is nothing you can do. At that point, you give up on the problem. And now today, with tools like Mathematica, you can just keep going. And so that's an object now. That's a thing that you can work with. And there are examples where people work with these things that formerly were regarded as too complicated. And sometimes they get simple answers out at the end. That's just an intermediate working stay.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merge them, we can distill them, we can do all these kinds of things. And there's going to be sort of almost a new, it's a big opportunity sort of in the philosophy of science to start to do that. There's sort of a like a...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That he changed his game quite radically after some public forensics were released on how Alpha Zero worked. So that's kind of an example where I think human beings are starting to extract meaning out of these models. And maybe that starts to lead to sort of viewing the models as a potential source of explanations. You need to do more work because they're not very legible up front, but you can extract them potentially. And I think that's kind of, I think that's kind of an interesting intermediate situation where they're not explanations, but you can extract interesting explanations out of them. You can use them as kind of a source. There are a new type of object in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as explanations, but we're in the past. We haven't had the ability to really do anything with them. And now we're going to have sort of new, interesting, new sort of actions which we can do.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe you shouldn't think about AlphaFold as an explanation in the classic sense, but maybe it contains lots of little explanations inside it. And so maybe part of what you can get out of interpretability work is you can go into Alpha Fold and you can start to extract certain things. Maybe basically by doing sort of archaeology of Alphafold, we can actually understand a great deal more about these principles. You can start to extract it, oh, that circuit does this interesting thing and we learn this. So I don't know to what extent that's been done with AlphaFold. I know it's been done a little bit with some of the chess models. I believe it's alpha zero. There seem to be some strategies which were certainly borrowed by Magnus Carlson at least, which he seems to have just taken from AlphaZero. I mean, I don't think there's any public confirmation of this, but some experts have noticed.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an incredibly interesting question. I mean, maybe a really pivotal question in the sense of, so if you're such a very classic point of view, you want these deep explanatory principles, you want it sort of as few free parameters as you possibly can, you want very simple models, which explain a lot. And AlphaFold doesn't look anything like that. And so you might just sort of say, oh, well, it's nice, it's maybe helpful as a model, but it doesn't have. It's not a scientific explanation. So that's kind of a conservative point of view. That sort of answer one to the question. I think answer two is to say something like...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example, I think, that should give you pause there is the big signature success so far is certainly AlphaFold. And of course, Alpha Fole really about AI, a massive fraction of the success there is the Protein Data Bank. So it's X-ray diffraction, it's NMR, it's CryoM, and several billion dollars that were spent obtaining whatever is $180,000 protein structures. So sort of that, you know, it's basically the story. That's a story of data acquisition principally. It's not only. I mean, the AI bit is very, very impressive. It's quite remarkable. But it is only a small part of the total story.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, just go back and sort of zoom out to your original question. So you're talking about sort of the verification loop in AI.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this example of Lyell, and other geologists sort of early 1800s basically having this idea of deep time does seem to have been crucial. I know Darwin was very influenced by Leel. And if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years evolution just starts to look like a non-starter, we should be seeing radical change in order to make it work on sort of a timescale of, say, five to ten thousand years or 6,000 years, Bishop Asher, you would need to be seeing evolution occurring at a massive rate sort of during human lifetimes, and we're just not seeing that. So that does seem to have been a blocker. It's interesting to, I mean, to your question, what are the blockers? Were there? Were there any others? And I don't know.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overwhelmingly powerful. And there's a whole bunch of problems as well. Like, he doesn't really understand what sort of. The mechanism for the mechanism is, he doesn't understand genes, like all these things.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's not incredibly weird, right? If you think that the origin of life Must have been very hard, like that there's a bottleneck that it's not so surprising.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and to connect it to geology and to connect it to all these other things. So that sort of hard work that making the case that it's actually relevant all across the biosphere is what he's doing there. He's not just having the idea. He's making a compelling case that, no, it's intertwined with absolutely everything else.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea must have been known to animal breeders for a long time at some level. Or certainly large chunks of the idea were known. Artificial selection was a thing. And in some sense, Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was to biology that you can potentially sort of go back and you can explain a tremendous amount about all of the variety of what we see in the world with this as not necessarily the only principle, but certainly a core principle. So he writes this wonderful, wonderful book, The Origin of Species. And it's just so much evidence and so many examples and sort of trying to tease this out and see what the implications are and to connect it to as much else as he possibly can.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no crank you can turn. You need a lot of people trying different ideas. The more difficult the idea is to have, the greater the bottleneck, but then also sort of the greater the triumph. Quantum mechanics is like, I mean, it's a great example of this. It's such a shocking set of ideas. It's such a shocking theory. Actually, the theory of evolution in some sense is also quite a shocking idea, not the principle of sort of natural selection, but that it can explain so much. That's a shocking idea.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these questions, the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the previous processes and heuristics don't apply. That's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks because people are smart. They know what has worked before. They study it. They apply the same kinds of things. And so they don't get stuck in the same places as before. They keep getting bottlenecked in different places. I mean, that's overgeneralizing a bit, but I think it's the right. If you're attempting to reduce science to a process, you're attempting to reduce it to something where there is just a method which you can apply and you turn sort of the crank and out pops insight. You can do a certain amount of that, but you're going to get bottlenecked at the places where your existing method doesn't apply. But definitional...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had this very different way of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious and part modern. It was a funny hybrid. He's sort of this transitional figure in some sense. That phrase the last of the magicians, I think really, really points at something.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's from. Actually, I believe it was a talk that he gave at Cambridge not long before he died. He'd acquired Newton's papers somehow. And then he gave a lecture, I think, twice about this, or that his brother Jeffrey gave at the other time because he was too ill. There's just this wonderful, wonderful quote in the middle. Oh, actually, the whole thing is really interesting. But I love this particular quote. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. And like this idea that people have that Newton was sort of the first modern scientist is somehow wrong. There's some truth to it, but he really...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, I think, starts to feel that's very compelling, at least to me. And I think most people find that very, very satisfying once they eventually realize it.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, good question. And I don't know sort of entirely the answer. I do know, well, I mean, I can give you a certainly... Apache lane so that I sort of sentries in the future start to find very compelling. And I'm sure it's sort of part of the historic story at least, which is one of the big shocks for Newton eventually, he did understand Kepler's laws of motion eventually. So you're able to explain sort of the motions of the planets in the sky. But he also, out of the same theory, his theory of gravitation, was able to explain terrestrial motion. So he's able to explain why objects move in parabolas on the Earth. And he's able to explain the tides in terms of the sun, the moon and the sun's effect, gravitational effect on water, on the Earth. And so you have what seemed like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, and then he's not able to let go of these things. Actually, a really interesting fact is that a few years prior, so 1890s, Einstein's a teenager, he believes in the ether too. Like he knows about this stuff. But he's just not quite as attached, obviously, as these older people were. And maybe they were a little bit prisoner of their own expertise. That's my guess. I mean, historians of science, some would certainly disagree.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had sort of almost too grand a vision in mind, and Einstein sort of almost subtracts from that and says, no, no, no, space and time are just different than what we thought. And here's the correct picture. And there's a paper in, I think it's 1909 where Pankaray, like he's still got this dynamical picture of what's going on with the length contraction. And we just, you know, this is just not necessary. This is a mistake from the modern point of view. And so why is he doing this? Like, why is he clinging on to this idea? And, you know, I don't know. I obviously never met the man. It would be fascinating to be able to talk it over and to try and understand. But he...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He seems to have understood the principle of relativity, the idea that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames. He seems to have understood that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. He doesn't actually phrase it quite that way, but is my understanding, but I don't speak French. And this is, I mean, these are basically ideas that Einstein uses to deduce special relativity. But then he also has this additional sort of misunderstanding where thinks that length contraction is a dynamical effect that somehow sort of particles are being pushed together by some external force, something is going on dynamically, and he doesn't understand that it's purely kinematics that actually space and time are different than what we thought, and you need to fundamentally rethink those things. So it's almost like he knew too much.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think you actually do want to go case by case and try and understand that it's not necessarily clear that they're doing the same thing wrong in all other cases. I mean, the Planck Cray case is amazing.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I just interrupt? I mean, you used the word process, and it's interesting to think about that term. Like process kind of carries connotations of, you know, it's something said in advance, it's something, and it's much more complicated in practice. You have people like Lorentz, who, I mean, Einstein just absolutely, utterly admired. And Pon Caray, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, and Michaelson, I mean, another truly outstanding scientist, never reconciled themselves. So it's not as though there's like some standard procedure that we're all using to reconcile these things. No, like great scientists can remain long for a very long time after the scientific community has broadly changed its opinion. But there's nothing centralized authority, right? Sort of saying, or centralized method.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a strong statement. I mean, If he'd been alive, I'm sure he would have tried, or it seems quite likely that he would have tried to save his theory by patching it up yet again, but it would have been a massive, I mean, that's a real setback. It starts to just look like, oh no, time is this thing that Lorence introduced as a mathematical convenience. No, no, no. That's actually what time is. Right. For the muons at least, and then there's a whole bunch of other experiments that show this very similar phenomenon.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at that point, like a lot of the leading physicists of the day, leading scientists of the day, basically accepted this result, that there was no ether wind. But what to do about this? So, yeah, sure, maybe you falsified some theories of the ether. There are others that you haven't falsified at all at this point. And people sort of set to work on developing those. Actually, it is funny. I mean, people will phrase it as show that there was, you know, that the ether didn't exist and even just the word there is kind of a misnomer. You actually had a ton of different theories and a couple of leading contenders. So yeah, there's some version of falsification going on, but like how you respond to this new experiment is very, very complicated. And most people responded, I mean, certainly the leading physicists of the day responded by saying, okay, this gives us a lot of information about”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source