If there's something you can bet on in life that will guarantee a win,

it's betting on the cleverness of a scientist.

There's this perception that scientists are uncreative, unimaginative, just focused on

numbers and methodology. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Folks, science is hard.

It's really hard. Making predictions, testing against observations,

developing hypotheses.

This is all hard and requires an insane amount of creative work.

Like think of quantum mechanics and superposition and spooky action at a distance and all the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

Do you think an uncreative person or a group of uncreative people came up with quantum mechanics with

how nuts it is? No, it takes a truly imaginative, creative person to come up with quantum mechanics.

And then to test these ideas, if someone just walked up to you and say, by the way,

by the way, I think there's fusion happening in the core of the sun. First off, that's a crazy thought. That's a crazy

creative, ingenious idea. And then how do you test that? How do you know if that's true? How do you

know if that's accurate or not? Think of how creative you must be in order to come up with a way to determine if the sun is fusing

hydrogen into helium in its core or not. How do you test that? How do you figure that out?

That requires an enormous amount of creativity and cleverness.

As another example, today's topic, the pulsar timing array. We've got a problem here. Gravitational waves. Einstein developed the concept of the theory

of general relativity, an astounding leap of imagination and

insight into the natural workings of our world. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

When Einstein developed special relativity in 1905, there were a few other people that were

sniffing along similar lines and probably would have come up with it if Einstein had never existed.

We would still have special relativity.

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