Yeah.

Lots of lots of parts of physics and astronomy really confused me.

Quite a lot of it, actually.

Um, certainly classical classic things, like quantum physics.

Very few people have any kind of intuitive understanding of it.

And I certainly wouldn't count myself as one of them.

Oh, many areas.

I guess there are some areas where if you if it doesn't confuse you, that really just tells you you haven't understood it.

So things like quantum mechanics and relativity, where the universe really behaves in a completely counter intuitive way.

If you really think well, that's pretty obvious.

Then I would say that almost certainly means that you really haven't understood it.

And it's only when you're really confused by it that you really getting close to understanding it.

Yeah.

How did the universe begin?

I mean, what happened before the Big Bang?

We can describe very detailed results of it and make predictions, but what initiated it?

No idea.

No way to figure it out.

Which bits don't you want to start?

I can cope with a lot of the subjects.

A string theory is way, way beyond me.

The difficulty with with string theory is that I'm I guess I'm an experimentalist.

A really I double in theory, known again.

But what I want to see is a connection with experiment.

I want to see a connection with the observations would be on with string theory.

Sometimes it's very difficult for me to see what that connection is.

I can appreciate to some extent the elegance of the mathematics, and I can appreciate where string theorists gets so excited to go.

We'll look at the beauty of this look at it has to be right.

But just because it's beautiful, just because it's elegant mathematics doesn't necessarily make it right.

So string theory and it's it's not frustrating that I can't figure out how to answer it.

It's frustrating that I don't even know how we can get any information from there.

How do we go about answering that question of no idea?

And that's really frustrating.

I find I find the idea of quantum computation very difficult.

Uh uh, the mean the basic principles.

I suppose I'm not so hard if you're a professional scientist, but how you're going toe to set up the cubits and then manipulate them and then read out the information on any useful scale.

There's a lot of optimism about, I guess maybe because I'm old, I'm very skeptical about the whole thing, but how you gonna actually make a useful machine out of it?

But maybe I'd be proved wrong in 20 years.

I find general relativity.

I spent one summer writing notes to myself on general relativity, so at least I had some understanding.

But it is beyond me.

They usually to do with interfaces where you think you have a little bit of knowledge on one and a little bit of knowledge on the other.

And you you should be able to joined the two together, and they don't quite work.

So, for example, in the field I work in, I sometimes overlap with cosmologists who think about galaxy formation on the so the onset of what's gone called going from the linear to the non linear regime, where you can do everything nicely on pen and paper, work everything on the linear on.

Then you know it's not gonna can't keep doing that.

Gravity takes over, and it becomes non linear.

On that interface, I find quite difficult to because I should be able to do it.

But I can't quite get it sorted out.

Thermodynamics always struggled with about university.

Yeah, that was That was not one of my best course is there are lots of things which are really quite technical, which I I can cope with, but when it gets to general relativity, it goes off into another area.