Every New Experimental Window Reveals New Physics

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]People were so stuck with this idea that all the other solar systems had to be like our solar system with a star and then some small rocky planets near it and some gas giants farther out. So, they're like, "Yeah, no point in even looking around other stars cuz we can't see Earth-like planets that that Eventually, some folks decided to just look anyway with the Doppler method to see if stars were going in little circles because something was orbiting around and they found these hot Jupiters like the giant gigantic Jupiter-sized thing going closer to the star than Mercury is going to our sun.

[00:00:36]Wow. And but they could have done that 10 years earlier, you know, if they hadn't been intimidated by these curmudgeons who said, "Don't look."

[00:00:45]So, my attitude is don't listen to the curmudgeons. If you have an idea for an experiment you can build that's just going to cut into some new part of parameter space, you know, and experimentally test the kind of questions that have never been asked, just do it.

[00:00:59]One and a half the time when people have done that, there was a revolution, you know.

[00:01:04]When when Karl Jansky wanted to build the first X-ray telescope and look at X-rays from the sky, for example, people said, "What a loser.

[00:01:13]There are no X-rays coming from the sky or do you think they're like dentists out there? I don't know what And then he found that there is a massive amount of X-rays even coming from the sun, you know.

[00:01:23]Or people decided to look at the Basically, whenever we've opened up another wavelengths with telescopes, we've seen new phenomena we didn't even know existed. Or when Leeuwenhoek built the first microscope, do you think he expected to find these animals that were so tiny you couldn't see them with the naked eye? Of course course not, right? But he basically went mad orders of magnitude in a new direction in the experimental parameter space.

[00:01:55]And there was a weather, the whole new world there, right? So, this is what I mean to think we should do with consciousness.