i am pleased to have nathan myhrvold back at the table. is it that makes a nathan myhrvold? >> i've only been me. >> charlie: the sample is small. >> this is not statistically significant, but i'm very curious about finding things out. and i love the process of trying to understand things. part of that means being confused and not knowing what's going on, then the transition of how you bring things into focus and figure it out and that's true across all the things you do. >> charlie: you start with a question. >> yeah. >> charlie: because you want to know something and you are confused because there is no easy access to the answer. >> exactly. so when i was a physicist, i was interested in the question of where did space and time come from. >> charlie: right. >> how did the universe begin? what is the basic stage on all other interactions occur which is space in time, what's that really about? so when i worked with stephen hawking, it was all about trying to come up with quantum theories of gravitation which would explain the fundamental nature of space and time. with some o

tonight, we explore the ideas in the mind of nathan myhrvold with nathan myhrvold. >> for inventions, there isn't people who fund them, there isn't an infrastructure of treat them as being valuable. inventions are like the stepchild in cinderella that isn't treated well even though ultimately it's a source of enormous value. >> charlie: done by lonely men and women in garages, it used to be. >> absolutely. when you say "inventor" to most people, they get an idea either of thomas edison or the crazy guy in the "back to the future" movies. that's what you think of as inventor. for inventors to make progress, they need funding, they need support, they need business expertise to advise them on what to do, and by and large those things are lacking. so what our company does is we say "we would like to make a business of investing in invention" so we do support inventors to have their crazy idea. sometimes those inventors are professors at universities, sometimes big and small, sometimes the lone guy in the garage. by providing them with a combination of a bunch of services and expertise and