Dwarkesh Patel
Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.
“We are spending as a society billions, maybe tens of billions of dollars, on building these huge physics experiments. And if you look at maybe the most beautiful, the most important theory of physics ever conjured, it seems like a guy just thinking in a cave — the empirical basis for that theory is maybe just knowing that light has a speed. I mean, maybe you need to measure G experimentally.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · July 2026
Context
Put to Adam Brown after he walked through how Einstein reached general relativity: the observation that the most celebrated theory in physics required almost no experimental input, at a time when physics is enormously capital-intensive. Brown's correction is that you don't even need to measure G — it's a free parameter in the theory.
Transcript
Can you tell the story of how GR went from a theory that Einstein had to something that the world came to believe is true?
…in the orbit of Mercury and indeed even in the other planets. You can just measure the redshifting as light as it goes, the gravitational effect on the propagation of light, the energy of light, all over the place. But historically, that was the most impressive confirmation of general relativity.
One question you could ask is we are spending as a society billions, maybe tens of billions of dollars on building these huge physics experiments, basically. And if you look at maybe the most beautiful, the most important theory of physics ever conjured, it seems like a guy who's just thinking in a cave, it seems like the empirical basis for that theory is maybe knowing that light has a speed. I mean, maybe you need to measure G experimentally.
Not really. G is a free parameter in general relativity. It does not... Not required. It's not required. Yeah, so you're right. The empirical basis is pretty thin. You don't need much. And theoretical physicists are pretty cheap. There's a great temptation. Why don't we just spend it all on…
Yeah, increasing the demand curve on the theoretical physicist, but yeah.
That's right. Yeah, not so cheap anymore. But how far can that get you? I would say that general relativity is perhaps one extreme of that. That is not how it usually works in the history of physics. This really is closer to some Ayn Rand hero just sitting alone, you know, the product of a single…
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