Michael Nielsen — Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us

Summary

Dwarkesh Patel sits down with Michael Nielsen — pioneer of quantum computing, author of the field’s standard textbook, deep-learning author who hooked Chris Olah and Greg Brockman, and now Astera research fellow — for a two-hour conversation that is ostensibly about how we recognize scientific progress and what that means for “closing the RL verification loop” on scientific discovery. The conversation opens with a careful retelling of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which textbook lore presents as the clean falsification that motivated special relativity. Nielsen patiently dismantles that story: Michelson kept doing ether experiments until his death in 1929, Lorentz produced a mathematically equivalent ether-based interpretation that experimentally could not be distinguished from Einstein’s, Poincaré had most of the right ideas but clung to a “dynamical” picture of length contraction, and Einstein himself later said he wasn’t even sure he was aware of the Michelson-Morley paper when he developed special relativity.

That extended case study sets up the central puzzle: scientific progress is much faster than naive falsification can explain, and much slower than it should be when great scientists are “prisoners of their own expertise.” Nielsen takes the Aristarchus-to-stellar-parallax 2,000-year verification loop and the muon-decay confirmation of time dilation — which arrived 35 years after the theory it confirmed — as evidence that something other than experimental verification is doing the work of community-wide acceptance. He proposes that aesthetic taste, parsimony, and unification across phenomena (Newton explaining planetary motion, projectiles, and the tides with the same equations) are the heuristics that let science move ahead of its evidence. He then turns to John Maynard Keynes’ famous essay describing Newton as “the last of the magicians,” using it to argue that the same heuristics Newton applied to alchemy and theology are visible in the Principia — and that the question for AI is whether such taste can be encoded.

The final stretch, driven by a long gap in the recorded transcript jumping from minute 21 to the closing sequence, lands on the personal methodology of learning. Nielsen argues that genuine internalization requires “high-stakes” creative forcing functions — writing a textbook, building a class, producing a demanding artifact — and that LLM-assisted study, while genuinely useful, is so seductive that it lets you substitute entertaining surface engagement for the aversive cognitive work that produces transferable understanding. He invokes Alan Kay’s old Linux dismissal (“a great big ball of mud”) to warn against confusing system-mastery with insight. Dwarkesh closes by admitting he is in the middle of trying to fix his own learning system before the next interview, and Nielsen reminds him that “tiny incremental improvements” in how you absorb knowledge are worth almost any cost.

Highlights

”Einstein wasn’t even sure he was aware of the Michelson-Morley paper”

“In actual fact he uh stated later in his life he wasn’t even sure whether he was aware of the paper at the time. There’s a lot of evidence that he probably was aware of the paper at the time but it actually wasn’t dispositive for his thinking at all. Something else completely was was going on.” — Michael Nielsen, 1:02

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”Lorentz’s interpretation cannot be experimentally distinguished from special relativity”

“His interpretation of length contraction and time dilation is that this is the effect of moving through the ether, and you have this pressure, and that pressure is warping clocks, it’s warping measures of length. And the interesting thing here is that experimentally, you cannot distinguish Lorentz’s interpretation from special relativity.” — Michael Nielsen, 7:05

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”Great scientists can remain wrong for a very long time”

“It’s not as though there’s like some standard procedure that we’re all using to like reconcile these things. No, like, great scientists can remain long very… can remain wrong for a very long time after the scientific community has broadly changed its opinion. But there’s no centralized authority, right, sort of saying or centralized method.” — Michael Nielsen, 11:04

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”Poincaré was almost a prisoner of his own expertise”

“It’s almost like he knew too much. Uh you know he had sort of almost too grand of a vision in mind and Einstein’s sort of almost subtracts from that and and says no, no, no, no, no, it’s it’s space and time are just different than what we thought.” — Michael Nielsen, 13:17

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”Newton was the last of the magicians”

“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.” — Michael Nielsen (quoting Keynes), 18:11

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”The hardest thing is so aversive you take any excuse to get out of it”

“I’m in some sense able to move much faster on some things through the help of AI but I don’t know if I’m like learning better. And I think it’s probably because the hardest thing, the thing that is most demanding is so aversive that you try to take any excuse you can to get out of it.” — Dwarkesh Patel, 1:59:42

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Key Points

• The textbook story of Michelson-Morley is wrong (1:02) - Michelson and Morley were testing competing theories of the ether, not falsifying its existence; Michelson himself believed in the ether until his death in 1929
• Boyle introduced the ether in the 1600s (1:02) - The question “is light vibrations in something?” produced 200 years of theorizing about the medium that Michelson-Morley was trying to characterize
• Michelson did ether experiments for nearly 50 years (4:18) - First experiment 1881; he kept refining them through the 1920s, never reconciling himself to special relativity
• Miller claimed to detect ether wind at altitude in the 1920s (4:46) - Prompting Einstein’s famous “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not” remark in response to the supposed measurement
• You cannot induce special relativity from a failed ether experiment (4:46) - The naive falsification picture breaks down even on its canonical example because what’s being falsified is unclear and induction doesn’t reach the alternative theory
• Lorentz’s ether interpretation is experimentally indistinguishable from Einstein’s (7:05) - Lorentz reads length contraction and time dilation as ether-induced dynamical effects; Einstein reads them as kinematics of space and time itself
• Muon decay (1940) was the late confirmation of time dilation (8:41) - Cosmic-ray muons decay way too slowly to reach the surface unless their time has actually slowed; the experiment arrived 35 years after the theory it confirmed
• The community adopted relativity before it was experimentally preferred (10:06) - Some non-empirical “process” — not standardized, not centralized — distinguished theories long before muons could rule between them
• Poincaré had the principles but kept the dynamics (12:19) - He understood relativity of inertial frames and constancy of c, but in 1909 was still treating length contraction as a real force pushing particles together
• Teenage Einstein also believed in the ether (14:17) - The asymmetry with older physicists wasn’t ignorance; it was a lower attachment to existing frameworks
• Einstein later showed the same pattern with quantum mechanics and cosmology (14:40) - The “prisoner of expertise” effect doesn’t spare even the people who broke the previous paradigm
• The 2,000-year heliocentrism verification loop (15:00) - Aristarchus proposed heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC; ancient Athenians dismissed it because they couldn’t see stellar parallax; the first parallax was measured in 1838
• Copernicus was less accurate AND used more epicycles than Ptolemy (15:00) - The standard “simpler theory” story is wrong; Copernicus added epicycles because he insisted on perfect circles, so neither accuracy nor parsimony explains the shift
• Newton’s gravity unified three independent phenomena (16:41) - Kepler’s planetary motion, terrestrial parabolas, and ocean tides explained by one theory — the kind of unification that becomes compelling without new experiments
• Keynes’ “last of the magicians” essay (18:11) - A late-life Cambridge talk based on Newton’s papers Keynes had acquired, framing Newton as a transitional figure with one foot in pre-modern magic
• Newton’s alchemical and theological work shows the same method as the Principia (19:31) - Per Keynes, “extreme method in his madness” — raising the question of whether the heuristics of taste are domain-invariant or domain-specific
• The bottleneck is wherever previous heuristics don’t apply (20:51) - Nielsen’s framing of where new science actually has to break new ground rather than rely on inherited intuitions
• Books that took three months to write produce 15-year retention (1:57:12) - Nielsen’s heuristic for how depth of effort relates to depth of understanding; quick books taught him very little
• High-stakes creative artifacts are the real forcing function (1:57:27) - Classes, books, demanding podcasts — collective creative ends that you act as input to — produce the deepest learning
• Dwarkesh prepares with three Susskind lectures plus practice problems (1:57:59) - For this very interview, Dwarkesh hired a physicist friend to invent practice problems because Susskind’s book has almost none
• “Going deep” on a subject means radically different things to different people (1:58:24) - Some people mean reading blog posts, some mean reading a book, some mean writing one; the standard you hold yourself to determines the depth
• AI assistance is “entertaining but not necessarily anything else” (2:00:03) - Nielsen’s diagnosis of why LLM tutoring substitutes for the demanding cognitive work it appears to support
• Alan Kay on Linux as “a great big ball of mud” (2:01:00) - The cautionary parable Nielsen uses for confusing system-mastery with transferable understanding
• Tiny incremental improvements in learning are worth almost any cost (2:02:29) - Because learning is the upstream input to a podcast or any creative output, every morsel of improvement compounds

Mentions

Companies

• Astera Institute (0:00) - Where Michael is a research fellow, mentioned in Dwarkesh’s introduction

Products & Technologies

• Michelson-Morley experiment (1881, 1887) (1:02) - The interferometer experiment used to test ether-wind theories; the famous 1887 version followed Rayleigh’s critique of the 1881 attempt
• Lorentz transformations (7:05) - The mathematical change-of-frame at the heart of special relativity, derived by Lorentz before Einstein but with an ether-based interpretation
• Muon decay experiment (1940) (8:41) - Cosmic-ray time-dilation confirmation
• Stellar parallax (first measured 1838) (15:00) - Friedrich Bessel’s Cygni measurement that finally satisfied the ancient Athenian objection to heliocentrism
• Ptolemaic epicycles (15:00) - The geocentric model that was both more accurate and simpler than the original Copernican model
• Susskind special relativity book (1:57:59) - Dwarkesh’s prep material for this interview
• Linux (2:01:00) - Alan Kay’s “great big ball of mud” — Nielsen’s example of system-knowledge that is not transferable understanding

People

• Albert Einstein (1:02) - Reframed special relativity as kinematics of space and time; said later he wasn’t sure he was even aware of Michelson-Morley
• Albert Michelson (1:02) - Author of the 1881 and 1887 experiments; believed in the ether until his death in 1929
• Robert Boyle (1:02) - 1600s introducer of the ether concept
• Abraham Pais (3:38) - Author of Subtle is the Lord, the Einstein biography Nielsen recommended
• Imre Lakatos (3:39) - The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes — another source of the standard textbook framing
• Dayton Miller (4:46) - Mount Wilson physicist who in the 1920s claimed to have measured the ether wind at altitude
• Lord Rayleigh (5:40) - Pointed out problems with Michelson’s 1881 setup, prompting the 1887 redo
• Hendrik Lorentz (7:05) - Derived the Lorentz transformations with an ether-based interpretation that experimentally cannot be ruled out by special relativity
• Henri Poincaré (7:56) - Understood relativity of inertial frames and constancy of c; clung to a dynamical interpretation of length contraction as late as 1909
• Aristarchus (15:00) - 3rd-century-BC heliocentrist whose theory waited 2,000 years for stellar parallax
• Nicolaus Copernicus (15:00) - His original heliocentric model was less accurate AND used more epicycles than the Ptolemaic system it replaced
• Ptolemy (15:00) - Source of the geocentric model that, with centuries of accumulated epicycles, was the more accurate option for Copernicus’ contemporaries
• Isaac Newton (16:41) - Unified planetary motion, terrestrial parabolas, and tides; Keynes’ “last of the magicians”
• Johannes Kepler (16:41) - His laws of planetary motion were one of the three phenomena Newton’s gravitation explained
• John Maynard Keynes (18:11) - Acquired Newton’s papers and gave the late-life Cambridge talk that produced the “last of the magicians” essay
• Geoffrey Keynes (18:11) - John Maynard’s brother, who delivered the talk one of the two times because Keynes was too ill
• Alan Kay (2:01:00) - Pioneering computer scientist whose dismissal of Linux as “a great big ball of mud” Nielsen uses as a parable about transferable understanding
• Chris Olah, Greg Brockman (0:00) - Credit Nielsen’s deep-learning book with getting them into the field

Surprising Quotes

“He continued to believe in the ether to the end of his his life or I think the last public statement he made is like a year or two before he died and he still still believed, basically believed at that point.” — Michael Nielsen, 4:18

“The interesting thing here is that experimentally, you cannot distinguish Lorentz’s interpretation from special relativity.” — Michael Nielsen, 7:05

“It’s almost like he knew too much. Uh you know he had sort of almost too grand of a vision in mind.” — Michael Nielsen on Poincaré, 13:17

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.” — Michael Nielsen quoting John Maynard Keynes, 18:11

“It’s entertaining, but not necessarily anything else.” — Michael Nielsen on AI-assisted learning, 2:00:03

“There is a seductiveness in just learning systems and confusing that with understanding.” — Michael Nielsen, 2:01:30

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel: 0:00 Today I’m speaking with Michael Nielsen. You have done many things, you are one of the pioneers of quantum computing, wrote the main textbook in the field, of the open science movement, you wrote a book about deep learning that Chris Olah and Greg Brockman credit them with getting them into the field. More recently you’re research fellow at Astera Institute and writing a book about religion, science and technology. I’m going to ask you about none of those things. The conversation I want to have today is how do we recognize scientific progress? And it’s especially relevant for AI because people are trying to close the RL verification loop on scientific discovery. And what does it mean to close that loop? But in preparing for this interview I’ve realized that it’s a more mysterious and elusive force even in the history of human science than I understood. And I think a good place to start will be Michaelson Morley and how special relativity is discovered, if it’s different than the story that you kind of get off of YouTube videos. Anyway, I will prompt you that way and then we’ll go in there.

Michael Nielsen: 1:02 Okay. Yes, so Michaelson Morley is uh one of the sort of the famous results often presented as as this experiment that was done in the 1880s and that helped Einstein, you know, come up with the special theory of relativity a little bit later. So so sort of changing our the way we think about space and and time and our fundamental conception of those things. And there’s kind of a big gap I think between the way Michaelson and Morley and other people at the time thought about the experiment and certainly the way in which Einstein thought or did not think about the experiment. In actual fact he uh stated later in his life he wasn’t even sure whether he was aware of the paper at the time. There’s a lot of evidence that he probably was aware of the paper at the time but it actually wasn’t dispositive for his thinking at all. Something else completely was was going on. So uh what Michaelson and Morley thought they were doing was they thought they were testing different theories of what was called the ether. So if you go back to the 1600s, Robert Boyle introduced the idea of the ether and basically the idea of the ether is uh we know that sound is vibrations in the air and then Boyle and other people got interested in the question of like is is light vibrations in something? And they couldn’t figure out what it was. Boyle actually did an experiment where he he tested whether or not you could propagate light through a vacuum. He found that you could, you couldn’t do it with with sound. So he introduced this idea of the ether and then for the next 200 or so years people had all these kind of conversations about about what the ether was and what its nature was. And the Michaelson and Morley experiment was really an experiment to test different theories of the ether against one another and in particular to find out whether or not there was a so-called ether wind. So the idea was that the the Earth is passing through uh maybe this ether wind and if it is passing through the ether wind sort of this background

Michael Nielsen: 3:00 Um, and you you shoot a light beam sort of parallel to to the direction the ether wind is going in, it’ll get accelerated a little bit, um, and if it’s being passed back sort of in the opposite direction, it’ll get slowed down a little bit and you should be able to see this in the results of interference experiments. And what they found, much to their surprise, I think, um, was that in fact there was no ether wind, um, and that ruled out some theories of the ether, but but not all, and Michelson certainly continued to to believe in the ether.

Dwarkesh Patel: 3:29 Okay so- this is what was a shocking part of um reading this story from the biography of Einstein that you recommended by um what was his first name?

Michael Nielsen: 3:38 Abraham Pais.

Dwarkesh Patel: 3:39 Abraham Pais. Subtle is the Lord. And and also from Imre Lakatos, the methodologies of scientific research programs. The way it’s told is that Michelson-Morley proved that the ether did not exist.

Michael Nielsen: 3:54 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel: 3:55 Therefore it created a crisis in physics that Einstein solved with special relativity. And what you’re pointing out is actually he was trying to distinguish between many different theories of ether.

Michael Nielsen: 3:59 Yeah, you know, if you’re in space or if you’re on earth, it’s the same direction of ether, or maybe the ether wind is being carried around by the earth and so you can’t really experience it on earth, but if you go to high enough altitude, you might be able to experience it. Um, in fact the Michelson’s experiments, the famous one is 1887, but he conducted these experiments for basically two decades. I mean for longer than that. He conducted them, I think the first one was in 1881, but he continued to believe until- I mean he died, he died I think it was like 1929 or so, it was like the late 20s. Um, and he was still doing experiments in the 1920s sort of about whether or not, you know, the ether existed and so- so he continued to believe in the ether to the end of his his life or I think the last public statement he made is like a year or two before he died and he still still believed, basically believed at that point.

Dwarkesh Patel: 4:46 And in fact there was an- another physicist, Miller, who kept doing his experiments and in the 1920s he thought that he went to a high enough altitude in Mount Wilson in California where I’m high enough that the- the ether winds are not being dragged with them by the earth, I- and I’ve measured um the effect of the ether. And Einstein hears about this and he says, this is where you get the famous quote, subtle is the Lord but malicious he is not. Anyways, I think the reason the story is interesting is for many different reasons, but one is one of the different ways in which the real history of science is different from this idea you get of the scientific method is you really can’t apply falsification as easily as you might think. Um, it’s not clear what is being falsified. Um, is it just another version of the- the theory of the ether that’s being falsified or- um, certainly you can’t induce the theory of special relativity from the fact that one version of the ether seems to be disconfirmed by these experiments.

Michael Nielsen: 5:40 Yeah, so- I mean certainly doesn’t show that, you know, ideas about falsification are- are wrong, are falsified. Um, but but you know, it does show that the sort of the most naive ideas, you know, are- it’s things are much- often much more complicated than you think. So you know, Michelson did this experiment in 1881, he was a very young man, and then- um, other people, I think Rayleigh was one of them…

Dwarkesh Patel: 6:00 pointed out that there was some problems with the way you did it, so they had to redo it in 19… in 1887, 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 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 and people sort of set to work on developing those. Actually, it is funny, I mean, people will phrase it as showed that there was, you know, that the ether didn’t exist, and even just the word ‘the’ there is kind of a misnomer. You know, you actually had a ton of different different theories and a couple of leading contenders. So yeah, there’s some version of falsification going on, but like how you 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 what the ether must be, but it doesn’t tell us that there is no ether.

Michael Nielsen: 7:05 In fact, Lorentz at the end of the 19th century, before Einstein, figures out the math, how you convert from one reference frame to another reference frame, comes up with the Lorentz transformations, which is basically the basis for special relativity. But his interpretation is that you are converting from the ether reference frame to these non-privileged other reference frames, if you’re moving relative to the ether. And his interpretation of length contraction and time dilation is that this is the effect of moving through the ether, and you have this pressure, and that pressure is warping clocks, it’s warping measures of length. And the interesting thing here is that experimentally, you cannot distinguish Lorentz’s interpretation from special relativity.

Dwarkesh Patel: 7:56 Yeah, I think that’s a strong statement. I mean, Lorentz introduces this quantity called local time, which he regards as… he’s not trying… my understanding is he’s not trying to give a really a physical interpretation of this, but it’s what Einstein would later just recognize as time in a… in another inertial reference frame. And he’s not trying to attribute much physical meaning to it. I think Poincaré gets much closer to later on to realizing that, no, actually, this is the time that’s registered by by clocks. But if you think about, you go, what is it, it’s 40 odd years later, people start doing these muon experiments where they see basically cosmic rays hit the top of the atmosphere, they produce a shower of of muons, and you can look to see at different heights in the atmosphere, you can look to see how many of those muons remain, and they decay over time. And a very strange thing happens, which is that they’re decaying way, way, way too slow. So you sort of expect, actually, they shouldn’t really…

Michael Nielsen: 9:00 Couldn’t be able to just last the whole way through the atmosphere at all, there’s just… their decay rate is too quick. If you were in a classical theory. But if in fact their time really has slowed down, it’s okay. And in fact, you know, the measured decay rates in 1940 and then there have since been more accurate experiments done, match exactly what you expect from special relativity. So, you know, that’s the kind of thing where again, if Lorentz had been alive, he’d been dead ten or so years at that point, if he’d been alive, you know, I’m sure he would have tried… 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…” you know, this thing that Lorentz introduced as a mathematical convenience. No, no, that’s actually what time is. For the muons at least, and then there’s a whole bunch of other experiments that show this very similar thing.

Dwarkesh Patel: 10:00 And when was that experiment done?

Michael Nielsen: 10:02 That was I think 1940 or 19… it might have been published in 1941.

Dwarkesh Patel: 10:06 So, maybe to then rephrase, change my claim, it’s not that you couldn’t distinguish them, but the scientific community adopted what we in retrospect consider the more correct interpretation before it was actually empirically or experimentally shown to be preferred. So there’s clearly some process that human science does which can distinguish different theories…

Michael Nielsen: 10:28 Can I just interrupt? I mean, you use the word “process” and it’s sort of… it’s interesting to think about that term. Like process kind of carries connotations of… it’s something set 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 Poincare, one of, you know, the greatest scientists who ever lived. And Michelson, 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 like reconcile these things. No, like, great scientists can remain long very… can remain wrong for a very long time after the scientific community has broadly changed its opinion. But there’s no centralized authority, right, sort of saying or centralized method.

Dwarkesh Patel: 11:22 Yeah. I mean, that is the interesting thing, that like there’s progress even though it is hard to articulate the process by which it happens, the heuristics that are used. Anyways, you mentioned Poincare. And so Lorentz has the math right but the interpretation wrong, and you should explain… it seems like Poincare had the opposite where he understood that it’s hard to define simultaneity because it requires some circular definition with time or velocity of something that might be, you know, arrive at a midpoint together, but velocity is defined in terms of time. And I find this interesting… there’s a couple other examples we could call on, but like there is this phenomenon in the history of science or somebody asks the right question um but then they don’t sort of clinch it and I’m curious what you think is happening in those cases.

Michael Nielsen: 12:08 I mean uh I think you sort of you actually do want to go case by case and try and understand it’s not necessarily clear that they’re they’re doing the same thing wrong in in all of the cases. I mean the Poincaré case is is amazing. Uh he seems to have understood the principle of relativity, the idea that 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 he doesn’t actually phrase it quite that way uh but but is my understanding but but I don’t speak French but uh uh you know and this is I mean these are basically these are the ideas that Einstein uses to deduce special relativity. But then he also has this additional sort of misunderstanding where he thinks uh that length contraction is a dynamical effect that somehow uh you know sort of particles are being pushed together by by you know some external force, some some something is going on dynamically and he doesn’t understand that that it’s purely kinematics, that actually space and time uh are are different than than what we thought and you need to fundamentally rethink those those things. So it’s almost like he it’s almost like he knew too much. Uh you know he had sort of almost too grand of a vision in mind and Einstein’s sort of almost subtracts from that and and says no, no, no, no, no, it’s it’s space and time are just different than what we thought um uh and and you know here’s the correct picture. And there’s a a paper in I think it’s 1909 where where Poincaré like he’s still got this dynamical picture of what’s going on with the length contraction. And we just yeah this is just not necessary, this is this is a mistake um from the modern point of view. And and so why why is he doing this? Like why is he clinging onto this idea? And I I don’t know I’ve you know obviously never met the man um uh it it would be fascinating to be able to to talk it over and and to try and understand but you know he he I mean his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he’s not able to let go of these these things. Actually a really interesting fact um 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 like he’s just not he’s not quite as attached obviously as as these older older people were. Um and and maybe they they were a little bit prisoner of their own expertise. That’s that’s my guess. I mean historians of science could could might would would some would certainly disagree.

Dwarkesh Patel: 14:40 Well there’s then there’s the obvious stories where Einstein himself later on is said to have not latched onto the correct interpretations of um quantum mechanics or cosmology because of his own attachments. I think that the the bigger question I have is like… The muon example is a great example of, um, these long verification loops and how progress seems to be happening by the scientific community faster than these verification loops imply. Um, maybe the clearest example is Aristarchus in second century BC comes up with the idea of heliocentrism. The ancient Athenians dismiss it on the grounds that, well, we should see as the Earth is moving around the Sun, if really the Sun is the center of the solar system, the stars should move relative to the Earth. Um, and the only reason that is not possible, that that would not be the case, is if the stars are so far away that you would not observe this. And it’s only in 1838 that stellar parallax is actually measured. And so we didn’t need to wait until 1838 to have heliocentrism, right? Like, we didn’t need to wait for the experimental validation to understand Copernicus better in some way. Um, in fact, when Copernicus first comes up with his theories, it’s well known that, um, the Ptolemaic model was more accurate because it had had all these centuries of adding on these epicycles. Um, what’s maybe a little bit less well appreciated, it was also in some sense simpler, um, because Copernicus actually had to add extra epicycles. It had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic model because he wanted—he had this bias that, you know, the Earth should go in perfect circles and equal time. Anyway, I think this is an interesting story because it’s like, it’s not more accurate, it’s not a simpler theory. So how—why was—how could you have known ex ante that Copernicus was correct and Ptolemy was not?

Michael Nielsen: 16:41 Hmm. I mean, good question, and I don’t know, sort of, entirely the answer. I do know a—well, I mean, I can give you a flash-post that I, you know, centuries in the future, start to find very compelling, um, uh, and I’m sure it’s sort of part of the historical story, at least, which is, uh, you know, one of the big shocks for—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, uh, the Sun’s—the Moon and the Sun’s effect—gravitational effect on water on the Earth. And so you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas. That—that, I think, starts to feel—that’s very compelling, at least to me. Um, and I think—I think most people find that very, very satisfying once they—once they eventually realize it.

Dwarkesh Patel: 17:51 Um, have you read the Keynes biography of Newton?

Michael Nielsen: 17:54 Oh, I have—did he’s written an—he wrote an entire biography?

Dwarkesh Patel: 17:56 No, no, no. The—the essay.

Michael Nielsen: 17:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel: 17:58 I love—I loved that.

Michael Nielsen: 18:00 I mean, this description of him as the last of the magicians is wonderful.

Dwarkesh Patel: 18:04 Yeah. In fact, I think it’s maybe worth superimposing or you should read out that one passage of the thing.

Michael Nielsen: 18:11 Alright. 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 his brother Jeffrey gave it the other time because he was too ill. And 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. He, I mean there’s some truth to it, but he really had this very different way of looking at the world that was part superstition and part modern. It was a funny hybrid. He’s sort of this transitional figure in some sense. And that phrase, “the last of the magicians”, I think really points at something.

Dwarkesh Patel: 19:31 The thing I’m very curious about with Newton is whether it was the same program, the same heuristics, the same biases that he applied to his alchemical work as he did to the understanding of astronomy. And so this is from the Keynes essay: “There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method, and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia if their whole matter and purpose were not magical. They were nearly all composed during the same 25 years of his mathematical studies.” So clearly there was some aesthetic which motivated people like Einstein to say, reject earlier ways of thinking and say, no, the ether is wrong, there’s a better way to think about things. Same with Newton. And the question I have is whether similar heuristics towards parsimony, towards aesthetics, etc., would be equally useful across time and across disciplines, or whether you need different heuristics. And the reason that’s relevant is even if you can’t build a verification loop for science, maybe if the taste has to point in the same direction, you can at least encode that bias into the AIs and that would maybe be enough.

Michael Nielsen: 20:51 I mean, these questions, like, the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the previous processes and heuristics don’t apply.

[Note: The middle of the recorded transcript — spanning roughly 21:00 through 1:57:00 — was not captured in the source JSON used to build this archive. The conversation in that gap covers, per the chapter timestamps in the official YouTube description: “Why wasn’t natural selection obvious much earlier?” (23:26), “Could gradient descent have discovered general relativity?” (29:52), “Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us” (50:54), “Are there infinitely many deep scientific principles left to discover?” (1:15:26), “What drew Michael to quantum computing so early?” (1:26:25), “Does science need a new way to assign credit?” (1:35:29), and “Prolificness versus depth” (1:43:57). The transcript resumes with the closing segment on internalizing what you learn.]

Michael Nielsen: 1:57:00 And I’ve written them in yeah, three months or six months. I feel like I didn’t learn very much from the ones that only took a couple of days.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:57:11 Understand.

Michael Nielsen: 1:57:12 Whereas you know, some other ones that took three months, I’ll be 15 years later, I’ll still remember.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:57:19 Yeah, can you describe outside of physics how you learn of the ones that took three months?

Michael Nielsen: 1:57:27 I mean, by far the most, the common things, there’s always some creative artifact. Sometimes it’s a class, sometimes it’s engagement with a group of people who there’s some collective creative artifact that you’re working on together. You might not even be aware of it, but you’re acting as an input to their creative ends in some way. And sometimes it’s just an essay or a book or whatever. It’s one of the reasons why I often quite enjoy doing podcasts. I mean, particularly, I said yes to coming here partially because I know you ask unusually demanding questions. And so it’s sort of that’s an attempt to get this sort of perspective from a different, it’s a different kind of a forcing function. So yeah, trying to pick sort of the most demanding creative context.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:57:59 Yeah, for this interview I went through like three lectures of the Susskind special relativity book. And the problem is that there’s almost no practice problems in it. And so I hired a physicist friend who’s going to like, I haven’t done it yet, but just like every lecture I want a bunch of practice problems to go through them and I’m planning on being appropriately humbled.

Michael Nielsen: 1:58:14 But how do you make it as jugular as possible, right? Like the higher you can raise the stakes, the better.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:58:19 I mean the interview is in some sense high stakes but also it doesn’t necessarily test deep understanding.

Michael Nielsen: 1:58:24 Yeah, but I don’t think the interview is that high stakes, right? You’re not writing a book about special relativity. And you’re not trying to write a book that replaces the current whatever the existing standard textbook is. Like that’s a really high, really high stake. One of the, a phrase that I sort of find particularly difficult and it’s a funny one, people will talk about going deep on a subject. And it turns out different people have different ideas of what this means. Some people means they read a couple of blog posts. Some people it means they read a book about it. Some people it means they wrote a book about it. And I think like sort of what your standard is, the sort of the standard you hold yourself to determines a lot about your ability to integrate knowledge in this way.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:59:42 I don’t know what your experience has been, but I found that I’m getting, I’m in some sense able to move much faster on some things through the help of AI but I don’t know if I’m like learning better. And I think it’s probably because the hardest thing, the thing that is most demanding is so aversive that you try to take any excuse you can to get out of it. And just having back-and-forth conversation with an LLM where you gloss over—

Michael Nielsen: 2:00:03 It’s entertaining, but not necessarily anything else.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:00:07 Yeah, so it’s such an easy way to get out of the thing. In fact, it makes it easier because instead of doing some intermediate thinking, you—there’s always a next question you can ask a chatbot.

Michael Nielsen: 2:00:17 Yeah. And—and it’s somewhat valuable. Like, it’s not—I mean, that’s part of the seductiveness, of course. Like—like, it’s not actually useless.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:00:23 No.

Michael Nielsen: 2:00:25 But—but yeah, it can sort of substitute for—for actually doing the thing that—that maybe you should be doing. It’s interesting that—like, the extent to which—to what extent should you be outsourcing that kind of stuff, and to what extent, you know, like, it’s really—there’s some sort of interesting judgment call about—you actually there is a whole bunch of routine work that you want done, and in fact, it’s low value for you, so you might as well get—if you can get a chatbot to do it, you might as well. Somebody interviewed the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay years ago, and he was asked what he thought about basically Linux. And if I remember his answer correctly, basically said, “Look, you know, it doesn’t have anything to do with computer science. It’s just a great big ball of mud. There’s a few interesting ideas in there which are—which are worth understanding, but mostly you’re—all you’re learning is stuff about Linux, like you’re not actually learning anything which is transferable.” I thought that was a very interesting—that there’s a certain kind of seductiveness to some things where—yeah, it’s sort of a Rube Goldberg machine. You can just sort of learn about all the bits and it feels kind of entertaining, but if you step back and think about the question, “You know, what am I actually doing here?” it might not actually be meeting your objectives. Maybe you want to become a sysadmin, and learning Linux is a great use of your time. There’s—no harm in that at all. But if—if your objective is to understand the fundamentals of computing, it’s much less—much less clear that that’s a good use of your time. I thought that was, you know, certainly an answer I’ve thought a lot about where you actually need to—for a certain type of mind, there is a seductiveness in—in just—just learning systems and confusing that with—with understanding.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:02:22 Yeah. Okay, I’ll keep you updated on how this goes. You know, I owe you a text within a month of—um, some revamped learning system.

Michael Nielsen: 2:02:29 I’ll be really curious if you—I mean, it’s also true, right, like, tiny incremental improvements in this, I mean, they’re just worth so much.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:02:37 I know. It’s sort of the main input into the podcast, you know. It’s great that the bookshelves are fancy and I’ve got a blackboard or whatever, but really, like, the thing that makes the podcast better is if I can improve the learning I do. So it’s—it’s worth every morsel of improvement. Yeah. Alright, thanks for the therapy session.

Michael Nielsen: 2:02:57 Great note to end on.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:03:00 Um, thanks Michael.

Michael Nielsen: 2:03:01 All right. Thanks Dwarkesh.