Episode
Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
Dwarkesh Podcast · Mar 20, 2026 · 1 h 24 min
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops. But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even…