Confessions of a Nobel Physicist | Jim Peebles on Truth, Reality, and Incompleteness

A conversation with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Princeton Cosmologist Jim Peebles on the nature of scientific knowledge, the practice of physics, and the ideas behind his new book, "The Physicist's Way" (Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691289832 ). This public conversation between Prof. Peebles and physicist Katerina Visnjic was organized by the student clubs PSPS and TiCuP* and took place at Princeton University in November 2025. Special thanks to the Princeton University Physics Department, Princeton University Press, Lance Herrington and Lisa Jackson of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, and the student club officers Dominick Corradino and Amelie Sillitoe for making this event possible. 0:00 Intro 2:21 Why Jim Peebles wrote "The Physicist's Way" 4:56 Can physics ever reach the ultimate truth? 6:53 Why every physical theory is incomplete 9:10 What does a physicist do? (Example: Einstein and General Relativity) 13:57 How experiments turn "just-so" stories into science 22:08 Why independent evidence matters 26:53 Why we can never know physics with absolute certainty 30:19 How theory and experiment work together 33:35 How physicists learn to think like physicists 38:53 "Different objective realities" and the search for unification 44:16 Teaching students to "think like a physicist" 49:30 Q&A: Karl Popper, falsification, and scientific bias 1:09:01 Can physics education encourage more creativity? 1:13:21 Physics and religion *PSPS: Princeton Society of Physics Students. *TiCuP: Towards an Inclusive Community of Undergraduate Physicists.