Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Episodi

• 
  She Says Spacetime Points Are Just Where Fields Meet 14.09.2026 1h 33min

  SPONSORS: - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE - One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code CURT at https://www.Ridge.com/CURT #ridgepod - Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This episode is about relationality — the idea that spacetime isn't a stage but something built out of fields defining each other. Lucrezia Ravera, physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin, joins to explain the dressing field method she's developing with Jordan François, and why she thinks the manifold itself disappears from the physical picture. We discuss Einstein's hole argument and the point coincidence argument, why gauge symmetry is a feature of physics rather than mere redundancy, and how a system as simple as two particles can act as quantum reference frames for one another. The conversation also covers relational quantum mechanics versus classical relationalism, why time and space variables vanish once you write physics in terms of fields on fields, and what it means to be a "first principle thinker" navigating a hyper-competitive, metrics-driven physics career. I hope you enjoy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Bundle Differential Geometry - 00:05:31 - Dressing Field Method - 00:10:40 - Einstein’s Point Coincidence Argument - 00:15:45 - Relativity vs. Relationalism - 00:21:00 - Gauge Redundancy vs. Symmetry - 00:26:30 - Relational Quantum Mechanics - 00:33:52 - Gribov-Singer Obstructions - 00:39:00 - Invariant Path Integral Quantization - 00:45:00 - Lorentz Dressing and Locality - 00:52:11 - Ontic Structural Realism - 00:58:00 - LQG vs. String Theory - 01:03:10 - Relational Quantum Field Theory - 01:09:00 - Foundations of QFT - 01:14:40 - AI and Truth-Seeking - 01:20:00 - First Principle Thinking - 01:25:30 - Creativity in Physics LINKS MENTIONED: - Lucrezia's Website: https://lucreziaravera.com/ - Lucrezia's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@R3Fram3D - A Hundred Years Since Quantum Mechanics [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/UE0RKcnNdR0 - On The Geometric Approach To The Boundary Problem In Supergravity [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01462 - Relational Bundle Geometric Formulation Of Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02046 - Geometric Relational Framework For General-Relativistic Gauge Field Theories [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04043 - Lecture Notes On Symmetry Reduction Via The Dressing Field Method [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29505 - Stueckelberg Action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stueckelberg_action - The Hole Argument: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/ - What Is Observable In Classical And Quantum Gravity? [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231078109_What_is_observable_in_classical_and_quantum_gravity - Relational Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002 - Wigner's Friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner's_friend - Mechanics As A General-Relativistic Gauge Field Theory, And Relational Quantization [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19845 - Jordan François: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s1_4CYkAAAAJ - Dynamical Implementation Of The Constraints In Conformal Gravity [Paper]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&user=cmc4wx8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=cmc4wx8AAAAJ:M05iB0D1s5AC - String Theory Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/X4PdPnQuwjY - Simon Saunders [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ihv542rCUns - Carlo Rovelli [TOE]: https://youtu.be/hF4SAketEHY - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/XVZzuIUZveg - Juan Maldacena [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6LbRHMvyrik - Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok - Neil Turok [TOE]: https://youtu.be/_xxLW71vT4s - Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E - Yang-Hui He [TOE]: https://youtu.be/wbP0KjWm0pw - Jacob Tsimerman [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6uIJdXmB4vE Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God? 07.09.2026 1h 9min

  SPONSORS: - Nobody likes a call center — ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs fixes that with voice AI that sounds human and works 24/7 in 30+ languages. Try it: https://elevenlabs.io/TOE - Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code TOE at http://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This episode is about how an invisible God comes to feel present to someone who prays. It is not about whether God exists. Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology at Stanford, joins to explain how people come to experience God as real, and why she thinks there are an awful lot of atheists sitting in church pews. We discuss Augustine hearing God speak, why the "spiritual but not religious" category has grown to nearly a third of Americans, why a more lovable, therapeutic God is paradoxically harder to believe in than a demanding one, and how practices like prayer and the Ignatian spiritual exercises make an invisible God feel present. The conversation also covers why religious studies classes (not biology classes) most often unsettle a young believer's faith, and the "liminal" psychological space — the same one that makes a childhood teddy bear feel alive — where Luhrmann argues God actually lives. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Experiencing God as Real - 00:05:32 - William James and "The More" - 00:10:45 - The "Teddy Bear" God - 00:16:00 - Neoplatonic Vibrational Theology - 00:21:40 - Placebo and Hypnotic Focus - 00:27:22 - Charles Taylor’s Secular Age - 00:33:46 - Feynman’s Two Heritages - 00:41:44 - Productive Doubt in Faith - 00:46:50 - Tarski and Belief Hierarchies - 00:55:40 - Apophatic vs. Cataphatic Prayer - 01:00:42 - Paracosms and Ignatian Exercises LINKS MENTIONED: - Tanya Luhrmann's Website: https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com/ - How God Becomes Real [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0691234442?tag=toe08-20 - When God Talks Back [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0307264793?tag=toe08-20 - The Faith Frame [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327517833_The_Faith_Frame_Or_Belief_is_Easy_Faith_is_Hard - The Varieties Of Religious Experience [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1439297274?tag=toe08-20 - Many Religious 'Nones' Around The World Hold Spiritual Beliefs [Article]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/09/04/many-religious-nones-around-the-world-hold-spiritual-beliefs/ - The Cultural Kindling Of Spiritual Experiences [Paper]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/677881 - Sacred Books Of The East: https://archive.org/details/SacredBooksEastVariousOrientalScholarsWithIndex.50VolsMaxMuller/01.SacredBooksEast.VarOrSch.v1v2v3comb.Muller.Buhler.Legge.Oxf.1879.1897./page/n43/mode/2up - A Secular Age [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0674986911?tag=toe08-20 - Two Great Heritages: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman - The Book Of Job: https://www.sefaria.org/Job.1.2 - The Highs And Lows Of Sufi Whirling [Article]: https://www.gqmiddleeast.com/article/the-highs-and-lows-of-sufi-whirling - Say What Your Longing Heart Desires [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1503614247?tag=toe08-20 - Sechit Madra [Trainer]: https://www.instagram.com/sechit_madra/ - Wolfgang Smith [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vp18_L_y_30 - Jonathan Pageau [TOE]: https://youtu.be/X3co_AA6yec - Becca Tarnas [TOE]: https://youtu.be/E49g3zJerss Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Tim Maudlin: Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH 31.08.2026 3h 18min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is Part Two of the previous lecture with Tim Maudlin (which went obscenely viral). It is the one with Bell's theorem in it. Maudlin traces how David Bohm's reframing of EPR using particle spin opened the door for Bell's 1964 proof, walked through step by step with a simple chart of coin flips: any theory ruling out "spooky action at a distance" must be deterministic, and no such local theory can match quantum mechanics's actual statistics. We cover common misreadings of Bell — that he assumed determinism (he didn't) and that his "free variables" require free will (they don't) — and close with the 1989 GHZ experiment, a cleaner, fully deterministic version of the same proof. Along the way: why Einstein's real objection was locality, not indeterminism, and why Maudlin calls the death of locality the most astonishing proof in the history of physics. Part Three is still to come. Stay tuned. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - EPR Completeness Criterion - 05:25 - Einstein’s Reality Criterion - 10:40 - Locality Implies Determinism - 16:20 - Bohm’s Spin Reformulation - 22:40 - Entangled Spin States - 27:40 - Stern-Gerlach and Quantization - 34:40 - Infinite Experimental Orientations - 41:00 - Heisenberg Uncertainty in Spin - 47:15 - The Singlet State Symmetry - 57:40 - Einstein vs. Copenhagen - 01:02:40 - Pilot Wave Theory Ontology - 01:11:30 - Configuration Space vs. Reality - 01:23:40 - Von Neumann’s "Foolish" Proof - 01:31:45 - Eliminating the Observer - 01:41:15 - Kochen-Specker and Contextuality - 01:51:15 - Contrapositive Logic of EPR - 02:03:10 - Offset Angles and Statistics - 02:14:00 - Bell’s Mathematical Impossibility - 02:20:00 - The 75% Disagreement Proof - 02:31:00 - Many Worlds Non-Locality - 02:37:15 - Statistical Independence Assumption - 02:42:50 - Free Will Red Herring - 02:54:40 - GHZ Three-Particle Entanglement - 03:03:30 - Mermin’s Cocktail Napkin Proof - 03:11:30 - Superdeterminism and Matrix Loopholes LINKS MENTIONED: - Tim Maudlin [Part 1]: https://youtu.be/9R0wrBpafYI - Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? [Paper]: https://www.drchinese.com/David/EPR.pdf - A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of "Hidden" Variables [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.85.166 - On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/ppf/pdf/10.1103/PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.195 - On the Problem of Hidden Variables in Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bell/Bell_1966.pdf - Free Variables and Local Causality [Paper]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/speakable-and-unspeakable-in-quantum-mechanics/free-variables-and-local-causality/EDDC5F294953B3AD140753BE20B67ADE - Bertlmann's Socks [Paper]: https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/Bertlmann'sSocks.pdf - Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0691028931?tag=toe08-20 - Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ - Quantum Reality [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0385235690?tag=toe08-20 - The Free Will Theorem [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0604079v1 - Bell's Inequality: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/ - Quantum Theory [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0486659690?tag=toe08-20 - Stern-Gerlach Experiment: https://www.britannica.com/science/Stern-Gerlach-experiment - Entanglement: https://etneil.github.io/grad_qm_lec_notes/entanglement.html - A Simple Proof of the Kochen-Specker Theorem [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0801.4931 - David Mermin's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=BqqUJzIAAAAJ - Relativity [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1520639996?tag=toe08-20 More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move. 24.08.2026 1h 33min

  SPONSORS: - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE. - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE There are three questions people ask about consciousness: what it is, how to explain it, and how to measure it. This episode is entirely the third one. Adrian Owen, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Western University, joins to explain how he detects consciousness in patients thought to be completely unaware — and why he believes thousands have been "hiding in plain sight" for decades. Owen walks through the landmark case that started it all: asking a non-responsive patient to imagine playing tennis, and watching her brain light up like a healthy person's. We discuss the differences between coma, vegetative state, minimally conscious state, and locked-in syndrome, and what recovered patients have reported about their experience — including one man whose memories were sharper than his doctor's. The conversation covers how movies like Taken are used to detect awareness through brain synchronization, why negative results can never prove someone is unconscious, and the ethics of asking a locked-in patient if they want to keep living. This is an in-depth conversation with Adrian Owen. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Trapped Consciousness Detection - 00:05:15 - Total Locked-in Syndrome - 00:10:40 - Wakefulness Without Awareness - 00:15:45 - The fMRI Tennis Test - 00:21:00 - Decoding Neural Intent - 00:26:30 - Mapping the Grey Zone - 00:32:00 - Non-Responsive Patient Lucidity - 00:37:30 - Life-Support Ethical Dilemmas - 00:43:00 - Brain-Computer Interface Futures - 00:48:30 - Hijacking Consciousness via Narrative - 00:54:00 - The Liam Neeson Test - 00:59:30 - Thalamocortical Pathway Disruption - 01:05:00 - Deep Brain Stimulation Potential - 01:10:30 - Anesthetic Awareness Dangers - 01:16:00 - AI and Language Lures - 01:21:30 - IIT Pseudoscience Controversy LINKS MENTIONED: - The Owen Lab: https://owenlab.org/ - Think Before You Think [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1324075163?tag=toe08-20 - Into The Gray Zone [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1501135201?tag=toe08-20 - Into The Gray Zone [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/01_ECXZK9dA - Detecting Awareness In The Vegetative State [Paper]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1130197 - Cortical Processing In Persistent Vegetative State [Paper]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(05)77805-3/abstract - Response To 'Minimally Conscious State Or Cortically Mediated State?' [Paper]: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/141/4/e26/4838964 - Risk, Diagnostic Error, And The Clinical Science Of Consciousness [Paper]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25844313/ - A Common Neural Code For Similar Conscious Experiences In Different Individuals [Paper]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1407007111 - Locked-In Syndrome: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/locked-syndrome - CIFAR: https://cifar.ca/research-programs/brain-mind-consciousness/ - Tests For Consciousness In Humans And Beyond [Paper]: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00010-X - Early Identification Of Recovery Potential After Acute Brain Injury Using Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy [Paper]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12028-026-02605-0 - Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk - Michael Levin & Anil Seth [TOE]: https://youtu.be/_kuwwmFnxGY - Iain McGilchrist [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Q9sBKCd2HD0 - Roman Yampolskiy [TOE]: https://youtu.be/TgFmA-Qwsek - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Simon Saunders [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Ihv542rCUns Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds 17.08.2026 1h 47min

  SPONSORS: - Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better — or your money back. For a limited time our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at https://cheershealth.com/TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor at the University of Sydney and author of Other Minds: The Octopus and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, joins to explain why he thinks meeting an octopus is the closest we'll get to meeting an alien. He's now developing a new, speculative theory of consciousness centered on rhythm. The conversation explores why he thinks "having a mind" is a graded property rather than a yes-or-no one — and what that implies for earthworms, bacteria, and plants. We discuss how many selves may exist inside a single octopus. Godfrey-Smith explains why he suspects rhythmic, large-scale electrical activity in the brain — not just point-to-point neural firing — is essential to consciousness. He also addresses what Anthropic's discovery of a "workspace" inside Claude does and doesn't show, and why he assigns computers a very low probability of being conscious. Finally, he makes the case for why a silicon neuron could never do "exactly" what a biological one does. This is an in-depth conversation with Peter Godfrey-Smith. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Cephalopods: The Closest Aliens - 00:05:30 - Defining the Unconscious Mind - 00:10:40 - Selfhood vs. Information Processing - 00:16:10 - The Graded Nature of Mind - 00:22:15 - Deflating the Concept of Life - 00:29:00 - Convergent Evolution of Intelligence - 00:35:40 - Distributed Neural Control Systems - 00:42:50 - Multiple Subjects in One Body? - 00:48:40 - Global Workspace Theory Critique - 00:56:10 - AI and the Conscious Workspace - 01:01:28 - Simulation Hypothesis Probabilities - 01:08:40 - Biological Hardware Constraints - 01:16:10 - Rhythmic Consciousness Theory - 01:22:30 - Mind Uploading and Silicon Neurons - 01:31:00 - Neural Dynamics of Subjectivity - 01:37:00 - Deep Ocean Intelligence LINKS MENTIONED: - Other Minds [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0374227764?tag=toe08-20 - Peter's Website: https://petergodfreysmith.com/ - Reality+ [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393635805?tag=toe08-20 - A Materialist Theory of the Mind [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0415100313?tag=toe08-20 - Rodolfo Llinas: https://med.nyu.edu/faculty/rodolfo-llinas - Bruno's Research: https://qbi.uq.edu.au/groups/vanswinderen - Dehaene's Commentary on Language Models [Paper]: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cc4be2488d65e54a6ed06492f8968398ddc18ebe.pdf - A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness [Book]: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Baars_88.html - Oscillations in the Central Brain of Drosophila Are Phase Locked to Attended Visual Features [Paper]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010749117 - The ENCODE Project: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/genomics/encode-project.html - What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [Paper]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf - The Explanatory Gap [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVMAQ - Inferring Consciousness in Phylogenetically Distant Organisms [Paper]: https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article/36/8/1660/120485/Inferring-Consciousness-in-Phylogenetically - Remarkably Bright Creatures [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0063204150?tag=toe08-20 - Giant Cuttlefish: https://australian.museum/learn/animals/fishes/giant-cuttlefish-sepia-apama-gray-1849/ - Cuttlefish Exert Self-Control in a Delay of Gratification Task [Paper]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/288/1946/20203161/86132/Cuttlefish-exert-self-control-in-a-delay-of - Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment - How We Found the Giant Squid: https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_how_we_found_the_giant_squid More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Jacob Tsimerman: He Won Math's Highest Prize. Then Announced the End 10.08.2026 1h 30min

  I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Ten days after winning the Fields Medal — math's highest honor — Jacob Tsimerman joins to explain why he's leaving academia temporarily for OpenAI's AI safety team, and why he's grieving even as he does it. The conversation covers why math is one of the first fields being radically reshaped by AI, whether a proof still counts if no one can understand it, what mathematical "understanding" really means, the ethics of elite access to frontier models, his disagreements with the Leiden Declaration, and his advice for young people weighing a career in pure math in an age of rapidly advancing AI. This is an exclusive first podcast with Jacob Tsimerman. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Fields Medal and Grieving - 00:05:38 - Canonical Human Cognition Patterns - 00:10:40 - Prompting the Mathematical Future - 00:15:40 - Pure Math and Physics Loops - 00:21:00 - Epistemic Black Boxes - 00:26:00 - Rigor Outgrowing Intuition - 00:31:20 - Cognitive Mechanics of Understanding - 00:37:00 - Gödel and Working Memory - 00:42:10 - Mathematics as Improvised Art - 00:47:30 - AI Power and Meritocracy - 00:52:50 - Math on the Chopping Block - 00:58:20 - Unrestricted Optimization Risks - 01:03:40 - AI Safety Manhattan Project - 01:08:50 - Training for Post-AI Careers - 01:14:10 - The Managerial Shift - 01:19:40 - Cognitive Offloading and Adaptation LINKS MENTIONED: - Jacob's Website: https://www.math.utoronto.ca/~jacobt/ - Jacob's Publications: https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Jacob-Tsimerman/3130599 - Quanta's Story On Jacob [Article]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/jacob-tsimerman-wins-2026-fields-medal-for-andre-oort-conjecture-proof-20260723/ - André-Oort Conjecture: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202410/rnoti-p1307.pdf - Canonical Heights On Shimura Varieties And The André-Oort Conjecture [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08788 - O-Minimal GAGA And A Conjecture Of Griffiths [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.12230 - Ten Advances In Mathematics And Theoretical Computer Science: https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/ - Thoughts About The Leiden Declaration: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/thoughts-about-the-leiden-declaration/ - Tobias Osborne LinkedIn Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tobias-osborne-601830a5_farewell-to-the-conjecture-prover-several-share-7487777959299276800-mxsa/ - Math For AI Safety: https://mathforaisafety.org/ - Charles Fefferman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fefferman - G-Functions, Motives, And Unlikely Intersections [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09867 - Tobias Osborne's QFT Lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDfPUNusx1EpRs-wku83aqYSKfR5fFmfS - AISI Website: https://www.aisi.gov.uk/ - Sebastian Jaimungal: https://sebastian.statistics.utoronto.ca/ - Edward Frenkel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/RX1tZv_Nv4Y - Roger Penrose [TOE]: https://youtu.be/iO03t21xhdk More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Becca Tarnas: Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World? 03.08.2026 1h 54min

  SPONSORS: - Nobody likes a call center — ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs fixes that with voice AI that sounds human and works 24/7 in 30+ languages. Try it: elevenlabs.io/TOE - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This podcast explores the uncanny link between two of the twentieth century's great visionary works. Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, joins to discuss her doctoral research into the parallels between Carl Jung's Red Book and J.R.R. Tolkien's lesser-known visionary writings. The central claim: working independently, both men produced strikingly similar imagery, timing, and figures — Jung's Philemon and Tolkien's Gandalf, the Eye of the Evil One and the Eye of Sauron — while each insisted their material felt discovered rather than invented. From there the conversation moves through active imagination, the reality of archetypes, psyche versus mind, and the line between mystical insight and psychosis — a wide-ranging look at where imagination ends and reality begins. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Jung and Tolkien's Red Books - 00:05:42 - Archetypal Rhymes and Parallels - 00:11:26 - Defining the Imaginal Realm - 00:16:38 - Active Imagination vs. Dreaming - 00:22:00 - Active Imagination Protocol - 00:27:00 - Psyche’s Spontaneous Expression - 00:33:57 - Ontology of Imaginal Figures - 00:39:03 - Psychologizing vs. Mythologizing - 00:45:57 - Planetary Archetypes Experience - 00:51:34 - Perceiving Universal Beauty - 00:58:23 - Universal vs. Objective Reality - 01:04:00 - Psychosis vs. Gnosis - 01:09:00 - Grounding the Visionary - 01:15:00 - Symbolic Language of Madness - 01:21:00 - Unearned Wisdom and Psychedelics - 01:26:30 - Motherhood as Expanded State - 01:33:57 - Meaning in Disconnection - 01:40:56 - Intuition in Science - 01:46:55 - Leonardo’s Light and Shade LINKS MENTIONED: - Journey To The Imaginal Realm [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1947544217?tag=toe08-20 - Participatory Imagination [Lecture]: https://beccatarnas.com/2020/08/28/jungs-participatory-imagination/ - Becca's PhD Defense: https://youtu.be/3soOYajHUBM - The Red Book [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393089088?tag=toe08-20 - The Holy Grail Of The Unconscious [Article]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html - Active Imagination: https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-active-imagination-features-methods-and-warnings/ - Jung On Active Imagination [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0691015767?tag=toe08-20 - Richard Tarnas's Website: https://cosmosandpsyche.com/ - The Passion Of The Western Mind [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0345368096?tag=toe08-20 - Psychological Types [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1614279705?tag=toe08-20 - The Fellowship Of The Ring [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0547928211?tag=toe08-20 - Kant's 'Categories': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ - The Imaginary And The Imaginal [Paper]: http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/mundus_imaginalis.pdf - Toni Wolff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Wolff - The Call Of Cthulhu [Book]: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx - The Shadow: https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/the-shadow/ - BBC Interviews Curt: https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002s4hd - Andres Emilsson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/gi08eVU_-f8 - Leo Gura [TOE]: https://youtu.be/R-w8k4smC74 - Iain McGilchrist [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Q9sBKCd2HD0 - Greg Kondrak [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FFW14zSYiFY - John Vervaeke [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3p8o3-7mvQc - Bernardo Kastrup & Susan Blackmore [TOE]: https://youtu.be/jrVnAWP2XEs - Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Tim Maudlin: Quantum Mechanics Explained FROM SCRATCH 27.07.2026 3h 2min

  I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a careful lecture that can be followed with zero background knowledge. Einstein thought he'd caught quantum mechanics in an act of spookiness — this podcast asks whether he was even worried about the right thing. Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy at NYU and a leading philosopher of physics, delivers a rare full lecture tracing Einstein, EPR, and the road to Bell's theorem. The central claim: Einstein's real objection was never determinism — "God does not play dice" is a red herring — but non-locality, which he inferred rather than assumed. Maudlin traces the argument from Einstein's overlooked 1927 Solvay objection through the EPR paper's criterion of reality, showing why Bohr's famous reply never actually answered it. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Einstein's Quantization Hypothesis - 00:07:20 - Photoelectric Effect Implications - 00:12:30 - Wave-Particle Duality Myths - 00:20:40 - De Broglie's Matter Waves - 00:26:40 - Copenhagen's Completeness Doctrine - 00:34:10 - Solvay 1927: Two Conceptions - 00:41:20 - Pinhole Diffraction Problem - 00:48:00 - Collapse and Relativity Violations - 00:56:00 - Epistemic vs. Ontic Collapse - 01:05:00 - Ontological vs. Dynamical Locality - 01:14:00 - Configuration Space Objections - 01:25:00 - EPR's Criterion of Reality - 01:32:40 - Analyzing the Reality Criterion - 01:40:50 - Causal Isolation and Locality - 01:48:45 - Entangled Momentum Eigenstates - 01:56:45 - Logical Core of EPR - 02:04:40 - Position-Momentum Simultaneous Reality - 02:14:00 - Inferring Determinism from Locality - 02:26:30 - Conservation Laws and Information - 02:37:40 - Counterfactual Definiteness Debunked - 02:44:00 - Bohr's Incoherent Response - 02:52:00 - Schrödinger's Entanglement Confession LINKS MENTIONED: - Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1444331272?tag=toe08-20 - On a Heuristic Point of View About the Creation and Conversion of Light [Paper]: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/lectures/Rotman_Summer_School_2013/Einstein_1905_docs/Einstein_Light_Quantum_WikiSource.pdf - The Ghost in the Atom [Paper]: https://vdoc.pub/download/the-ghost-in-the-atom-a-discussion-of-the-mysteries-of-quantum-physics-1guq071e2ukg - Collected Papers on Wave Mechanics [Paper]: https://mwolf.pracownicy.uksw.edu.pl/MK/Schrodinger_Collected_Papers_on_Wave_Mechanics.pdf - Quantum Theory at the Crossroads [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0521814219?tag=toe08-20 - Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.47.777 - Bohr's EPR Critique [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.48.696 - The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/teaching/partiii/pdf/SchroedingerPresentSituation1935(1980trans).pdf - Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality [Paper]: https://cds.cern.ch/record/142461/files/198009299.pdf - On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/ppf/pdf/10.1103/PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.195 - Quantum Theory and Measurement [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0691613168?tag=toe08-20 - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss - Sean Carroll [TOE]: https://youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo - Robert Sapolsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8 - Jenann Ismael [TOE]: https://youtu.be/7kvXihDAOi0 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists 20.07.2026 1h 16min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a podcast all about parallel universes, and whether we have any right to believe in them. David Wallace, professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading defender of the Many Worlds Interpretation, joins Professor Emily Adlam, his former student, for a rare joint conversation. The central fault line: Adlam argues no one living inside a many-worlds universe could ever rationally confirm the theory describing it, since Everettian probability may undermine the evidence used to support quantum mechanics itself. Wallace disagrees, but takes the challenge seriously. From there they range across the nature of the wave function, relational quantum mechanics, QBism, and scientific intersubjectivity — two sharp, collegial minds disagreeing productively about what kind of universe we actually live in. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Wave Function Ontology - 00:05:35 - Everettian Probability Problem - 00:11:45 - Relational Quantum Mechanics Limits - 00:19:15 - Quantum Gravity Frameworks - 00:24:50 - Subsystem Decomposition Approximations - 00:31:10 - Testing Wavefunction Collapse - 00:38:35 - Scientific Intersubjectivity Crisis - 00:47:55 - Many Worlds Rationality Constraints - 00:58:50 - QBism and Physical Reality - 01:05:05 - Conservative Philosophy of Physics LINKS MENTIONED: - Emily Adlam's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RlTqjZMAAAAJ - David Wallace's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Z35CeHAAAAAJ - Pointer Basis Of Quantum Apparatus [Paper]: https://libertadacademica.com/Cuantica/ModernaHist/Zurek%20b.pdf - Information Is Physical [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13342 - Relative Information, Relative Facts [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11349 - What Kind Of Relationality Does Quantum Mechanics Exhibit? [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06991 - Models Of Wave-Function Collapse, Underlying Theories, And Experimental Tests [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4325 - On Gravity's Role In Quantum State Reduction [Paper]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02105068 - Real Patterns In Physics And Beyond [Paper]: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23888/ - Learning To Represent [Paper]: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23224/1/learning_to_represent.pdf - Operational Theories As Structural Realism [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09316 - Relational Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002 - Measurement Outcomes And Probability In Everettian Quantum Mechanics [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1355219806000694 - Quantum Probability From Subjective Likelihood [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0312157 More links (past guest episodes) at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Ginestra Bianconi: The Physicist Who (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity From Entropy 13.07.2026 58min

  I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Ginestra Bianconi thinks gravity can be derived from entropy — and that gravity itself is fundamentally anti-reductionistic, since it's about geometry rather than isolated particle interactions. In this episode, the network-topologist-turned-gravity-theorist explains her "Gravity from Entropy" action, which treats matter and geometry symmetrically through a geometric quantum relative entropy (not the horizon entropy of Verlinde or Jacobson). She details why it reduces to Einstein's equations at low energy while predicting a dynamical, always-positive dark energy term (the "G field"), how it may avoid black hole singularities and reproduce the area law without invoking holography, and why she believes understanding the brain may be harder than understanding quantum gravity. We close with her advice for young researchers. I hope you enjoy. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - Information Content of Geometry - 07:38 - Geometric Quantum Relative Entropy - 15:58 - Geometrizing the Matter Field - 23:45 - Emergent Dark Energy - 30:12 - Statistical Mechanics vs Thermodynamics - 37:59 - Structure and Dynamics Interplay - 45:20 - Holography and Area Law - 51:23 - Interdisciplinary Research Vision LINKS MENTIONED: Ginestra's Webpage: https://webspace.maths.qmul.ac.uk/g.bianconi/ Ginestra's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ycQXwWgAAAAJ Gravity from Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14391 Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0393319911?tag=toe08-20 The Thermodynamics of the Gravity from Entropy Theory [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22545 Notes on Some Entanglement Properties of Quantum Field Theory [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04993 Inflation from Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23987 Thermodynamics of Spacetime: The Einstein Equation of State [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9504004 More Is Different [Paper]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393 Information, Physics, Quantum [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf Network Geometry with Flavor [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.04539 Black Holes and Entropy [Paper]: https://physicsgg.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/black-holes-and-entropy_bekenstein.pdf Ginestra's Lecture on Higher-Order Networks: https://youtu.be/o4TWDTgqQKY Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY Frederic Schuller [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Bnh-UNrxYZg Erik Verlinde [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ilVImMHcr_g Ted Jacobson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3mhctWlXyV8 Karl Friston [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2v7LBABwZKA Subir Sarkar [TOE]: https://youtu.be/epkuoytFJWA Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E Roman Yampolskiy [TOE]: https://youtu.be/TgFmA-Qwsek Eva Miranda [TOE]: https://youtu.be/6XyMepn-AZo Cumrun Vafa [TOE]: https://youtu.be/kUHOoMX4Bqw Neil Turok [TOE]: https://youtu.be/zNZCa1pVE20 David Kaiser [TOE]: https://youtu.be/_yebLXsIdwo Ivette Fuentes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/YWbjI-QsH2E Philip Mannheim [TOE]: https://youtu.be/rNXNHYvS7zU FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Curt Jaimungal: Reality Is Bloody Terrifying 08.07.2026 9min

  What does it mean to investigate the "nature of reality"? In this episode, we break down the term across philosophy, physics, mathematics, cognitive science, and theology: exploring questions of metaphysics, fundamentality, reductionism, and grounding. We also touch on a conversation with Slavoj Žižek and why the question of why the universe follows laws at all may be the deepest question of all. Plus: why art belongs in this conversation, and why "fundamental" doesn't mean what most people think it means. I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - Metaphysical Foundations - 02:51 - Fundamentality vs. Reductionism - 05:12 - Phenomenology and Art - 07:14 - Münchhausen’s Trilemma (Curt's topological interpretation) LINKS MENTIONED: - Quantum Healing [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0553348698?tag=toe08-20 - Realism [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20115760 - Mean, Means and Meaning [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/mean-means-and-meaning - Harvey Friedman [TOE]: https://youtu.be/gx3uKT1qJvY - The Reverse Elephant [TOE]: https://youtu.be/q2Zgp2EhSk8 - Slavoj Žižek [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ZLVxfmfds38 - John Norton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Tghl6aS5A3M - Most Abused Theorem in Math [TOE]: https://youtu.be/OH-ybecvuEo - Münchhausen Trilemma: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/M%C3%BCnchhausen+trilemma - Know Time Interviews Curt: https://youtu.be/K_jCtpQgqB0 FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Philip Mannheim: The Story of Conformal Gravity 06.07.2026 2h 36min

  SPONSORS: - Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code TOE at http://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad - Shopify: Accelerate your efficiency. Free trial at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This podcast is about dark matter — and Professor Philip Mannheim thinks it isn't missing at all, just hiding in plain sight as the rest of the visible universe. In his first-ever podcast, on ideas he's pursued since 1972, Mannheim lays out conformal gravity: a theory built on Weyl symmetry rather than Einstein's equations, which explains galaxy rotation curves without dark matter, tames the cosmological constant, and fits the accelerating universe without fine-tuning. With longtime collaborator Carl Bender, he also resolves gravity's infamous "ghost" problem using PT symmetry instead of Hermiticity — suggesting the graviton may not even exist as a particle. I hope you enjoy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Einstein's Relativity Foundations - 00:05:47 - Riemann Tensor and Curvature - 00:11:50 - Flaws in Einstein's Equations - 00:17:23 - Quantum Gravity Renormalizability - 00:23:28 - Conformal Symmetry Principles - 00:30:09 - Dynamical Mass Generation - 00:37:08 - Inflation and Horizon Problems - 00:43:55 - Renormalization Group Fixed Points - 00:51:05 - Composite Higgs Solution - 00:57:03 - Weyl Tensor Action - 01:03:44 - Solving Dark Matter - 01:09:36 - Cosmic Coincidence Problem - 01:16:27 - Hubble Tension and Redshift - 01:24:31 - PT Symmetry and Ghosts - 01:31:21 - Probability Conservation vs. Hermiticity - 01:38:13 - CPT Theorem and Fermions - 01:45:14 - Quantum Decays and Resonances - 01:51:05 - Parity and Right-Handed Neutrinos - 01:56:14 - Gravitons and Wavefunction Collapse - 02:02:24 - Cyclic Universes and Singularities - 02:08:24 - String Theory Fine-Tuning - 02:14:45 - Unitarity and Poincaré Stresses - 02:21:02 - Gravitational Lensing and Tenure - 02:26:55 - Nature and Experimental Data LINKS MENTIONED: - Philip's Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/998943 - Newton's Law Of Gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation - Geodesics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_in_general_relativity - Equivalence Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle - Introduction To General Relativity [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0070004234?tag=toe08-20 - Foundation Of The General Theory Of Relativity [Paper]: https://isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/St.%20John's%20College's,%20TAC's%20curricula's,%20et%20alii%20sci.%20papers/1916-%20The%20Foundation%20of%20the%20General%20Theory%20of%20Relativity%20(Einstein).pdf - Dynamical Symmetry Breaking As A Bootstrap [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.12.1772 - Dynamics Of The Universe And Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking [Paper]: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980ApJ...241L..59K/abstract - Mass Generation, The Cosmological Constant Problem, Conformal Symmetry, And The Higgs Boson [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08907 - Living Without Supersymmetry [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01399 - Exact Vacuum Solution To Conformal Weyl Gravity And Galactic Rotation Curves [Paper]: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989ApJ...342..635M/abstract - No-Ghost Theorem For The Pais-Uhlenbeck Oscillator [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0207 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Curt Jaimungal: What is Existence, Exactly? 01.07.2026 22min

  I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Does Batman exist? Not really—but proving he doesn't turns out to be a logical minefield. This episode tackles negative existentials: why saying "X doesn't exist" seems to require referring to X in the first place. We trace the debate from Russell's theory of descriptions, through Kripke's devastating critique in Naming and Necessity, to Meinong's radical claim that non-existent objects still populate our domain of discourse. Plus: null pointer exceptions as computer science's Meinongianism, why AI struggles with fictional facts, and why three competing theories—descriptivism, Meinongianism, and abstract realism—each come with a steep philosophical price tag. I hope you enjoy. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - The Batman Paradox - 03:26 - Russell’s Theory of Descriptions - 06:36 - Kripke’s Rigid Designators - 09:44 - Meinongian Domain Quantification - 12:45 - Nuclear and Extra-Nuclear Properties - 15:50 - Modal Descriptivism and AI - 18:54 - Presentism and Temporal Ontology LINKS MENTIONED: - Diana Pasulka [TOE]: https://youtu.be/E5MuTHUbMUs - Why I Don't Buy The Simulation Hypothesis [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3_lBPMc6JRY - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Naming And Necessity [Book]: https://neuroself.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/naming-and-necessity-full-text.pdf - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0486404455?tag=toe08-20 - Critique Of Pure Reason [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0140447474?tag=toe08-20 - The Interpretations Of Quantum Mechanics In 5 Minutes [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/the-interpretations-of-quantum-mechanics - Alexius Meinong: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meinong/ - On Denoting [Paper]: https://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Russell(1905).pdf - Graham Priest [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ZGOMmGK4eeY - Nonexistent Objects [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0300024045?tag=toe08-20 - Abstract Objects [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/9027714746?tag=toe08-20 - Noam Chomsky [TOE]: https://youtu.be/RIY0GFtHU2U - John Vervaeke [TOE]: https://youtu.be/GVj1KYGyesI - Presentism: https://iep.utm.edu/time/ - Joscha Bach [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3MNBxfrmfmI - Existence [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1107625262?tag=toe08-20 FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Simon Saunders: The Unsettling Mysteries of Time 29.06.2026 1h 45min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a podcast all about time: depending on how you look at it, that's either unnerving or exhilarating. Professor Simon Saunders — Emeritus Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and one of the most celebrated philosophers of physics alive — goes deep on what time actually is, why special relativity demands a block universe, and what any of this has to do with the Many Worlds Interpretation. Why doesn't space inherit the paradoxes of time? What's really missing from the block universe picture (and is it the same thing missing from quantum probability?) Saunders argues that Bell inequality violations aren't evidence against locality but evidence for Many Worlds, presents a novel derivation of the Born rule from a single physical postulate, and sketches a quantum version of Leibniz's monadology as a possible path through the mind-body problem. I hope you enjoy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Defining Temporal Passage - 00:05:03 - Block Universe and Relativity - 00:11:15 - The Timeless Viewpoint - 00:18:07 - CMB and Global Time - 00:23:19 - Persistence and Spatial Revisitability - 00:31:02 - Philosophy of Physics Foundations - 00:38:46 - Relativistic Localization Problems - 00:49:22 - Reeh-Schlieder and Vacuum States - 00:55:23 - Branching and Actuality - 01:05:41 - Interval Probabilities and Frequentism - 01:14:14 - Decoherent Histories Interpretation - 01:25:49 - Ontic Structural Realism - 01:32:15 - Deriving the Born Rule - 01:38:02 - Leibnizian Quantum Monadology LINKS MENTIONED: - Simon's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=htEv3XIAAAAJ - Many Worlds? [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199560560?tag=toe08-20 - A Brief History of Time [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0553380168?tag=toe08-20 - How Relativity Contradicts Presentism [Paper]: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~lina0174/kansas.pdf - Trouble With Quantum Mechanics [Article]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/ - Locality, Complex Numbers, and Relativistic Quantum Theory [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/192768 - Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ - Finite Frequentism Explains Quantum Probability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12954 - Chance in the Everett Interpretation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04720 - Reeh-Schlieder Defeats Newton-Wigner [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007060 - Everett's Thesis [Paper]: https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/everett_phd.pdf - Physics and Leibniz's Principles [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/rec/SAUPAL-2 - Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1605204536?tag=toe08-20 - Avshalom Elitzur [TOE]: https://youtu.be/pWRAaimQT1E - David Wallace [TOE]: https://youtu.be/4MjNuJK5RzM - David Deutsch [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vKeWv-cdWkM - Sean Carroll [TOE]: https://youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss - Sechit Madra (Trainer): https://www.instagram.com/sechit_madra More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Neil Turok: A Route to Quantum Gravity (Without Strings) 22.06.2026 1h 55min

  SPONSORS: - Exclusive Plaud Prime Day discount for Curt's viewers: use code CURT for up to 20% OFF at https://www.plaud.ai/curt - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a breaking podcast. We're premiering a new paradigm for quantizing 4D gravity here first, without strings. Neil Turok — inaugural Higgs Chair at Edinburgh, former director of Perimeter Institute, and 2026 Fellow of the Royal Society — believes quantum gravity may not require strings, extra dimensions, or a multiverse. The key: a 1970s theory called quadratic gravity, long abandoned over two seemingly fatal problems. Turok and Bateman argue both problems dissolve — one by reinterpreting a classical instability as ordinary gravitational expansion, the other by a subtle tweak to the Born rule that allows quantum states of negative norm without ever producing negative probabilities. One quiet assumption, Turok argues, underpins decades of string theory's necessity. Drop it, and the whole case for a multiverse unravels. Neil graciously gave me a sneak peek at his and his PhD student Sam Bateman's new research. Bleeding edge! I hope you enjoy. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Quadratic Gravity Emergence - 00:05:03 - Renormalization and Asymptotic Freedom - 00:10:57 - Ghosts and Krein Spaces - 00:16:00 - Generalizing the Born Rule - 00:23:27 - Ostrogradsky Instability Reinterpreted - 00:31:29 - UV Completeness and QCD - 00:38:21 - Higgs Compositeness and Hierarchy - 00:43:58 - CPT Symmetric Universe Minimalism - 00:52:54 - The 36 Fields Mystery - 01:00:10 - Orthodoxy vs. Revolutionary Ideas - 01:06:39 - Gravitational Entropy and Smoothness - 01:16:14 - Multiverse Measure Problem - 01:23:05 - Theoretical Physics Health - 01:30:07 - Sam Bateman’s Breakthrough - 01:43:33 - Philosophy of Cosmology LINKS MENTIONED: - Neil's Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/985402 - Renormalization of Higher-Derivative Quantum Gravity [Paper]: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.16.953 - Quadratic Gravity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_gravity - Asymptotic Freedom in Higher-Derivative Quantum Gravity [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0370269385902485 - Ostrogradsky's Theorem: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Ostrogradsky's_theorem_on_Hamiltonian_instability - Krein Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_inner_product_space - CPT-Symmetric Universe [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08928 - Pathologies of Dimension-Zero Scalar Fields [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05683 - No-Ghost Theorem for Pais-Uhlenbeck Oscillator [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.0207 - Cancelling the Vacuum Energy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06258 - Gravitational Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.07279 - Neil's Lecture: https://pirsa.org/15100070 - Neil Turok on the Big Bang [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ZUp9x44N3uE - Neil Turok on Black Holes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/zNZCa1pVE20 - Carlo Rovelli [TOE]: https://youtu.be/hF4SAketEHY - Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok - Jacob Barandes [TOE]: https://youtu.be/wrUvtqr4wOs - Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE - Harvey Friedman [TOE]: https://youtu.be/gx3uKT1qJvY More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Roman Yampolskiy: We're Simulated. AI Is Conscious. And We Can't Win. 01.06.2026 2h 1min

  SPONSORS: - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Roman Yampolskiy has spent two decades being right about things people wished he wasn't — and he's not here to scare you, but to be precise. He argues AI alignment isn't merely unsolved but fundamentally under-defined: no agreed-upon values, no way to formalize them even if there were, and no mechanism for enforcing them on something smarter than its creators. His strongest argument isn't a doom scenario, it's that you cannot indefinitely control something smarter than you. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Defining General Intelligence - 00:05:58 - AI Instrumental Convergence - 00:11:11 - The Orthogonality Thesis - 00:16:15 - Escaping the Simulation - 00:21:45 - Principle of Indifference - 00:27:51 - Acquired Savant Syndrome - 00:33:51 - LLM Internal States - 00:41:02 - AI Safety Impossibility Results - 00:47:16 - Public Misconceptions - 00:53:21 - Existential vs. Suffering Risks - 01:01:20 - AI Alignment Definition Crisis - 01:09:28 - Computational Irreducibility - 01:16:20 - Substrate Independence - 01:22:50 - Philosophical Zombie Critique - 01:29:57 - The Cassandra Paradox - 01:37:35 - Religion and Simulation - 01:46:03 - Digital Physics Evidence - 01:51:20 - Limits of Control LINKS MENTIONED: - Roman's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0_Rq68cAAAAJ - Roman's Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPIq6Bb-1iLmqyksJjy4kLQ - Roman's Twitter: https://x.com/romanyam - Roman's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roman.yampolskiy - AI Identity [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/archive/ZIETPO-7 - Basic AI Drives [Paper]: https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf - Qualia in Agents [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04020 - Orthogonality Thesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf - Escape the Simulation [Paper]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369187097_How_to_Escape_From_the_Simulation - Could This AI Be Conscious? [Article]: https://unherd.com/2026/05/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution - Impossibility Results in AI [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00484 - When AIs Act Emotional: https://youtu.be/D4XTefP3Lsc - Hacking the Simulation [Paper]: https://philarchive.org/rec/YAMHTS-2 - Autonomous Machine Intelligence [Paper]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf - Hinton on Maternal Instincts [Article]: https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-maternal-instincts-superintelligence/ - Singleton Hypothesis [Paper]: https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton - New Kind of Science [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1579550088?tag=toe08-20 - On AI Controllability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04071 - Universe as Numerical Simulation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 - Nir Lahav [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3nHiOtnnrzA - Joscha Bach [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3MNBxfrmfmI - Bas Van Fraassen [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lhpRAWxvY5s - Simulation Hypothesis [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3_lBPMc6JRY - Geoffrey Hinton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/b_DUft-BdIE - Max Tegmark [TOE]: https://youtu.be/-gekVfUAS7c - Stephen Wolfram [TOE]: https://youtu.be/FkYer0xP37E - David Chalmers [TOE]: https://youtu.be/5r9V1ryksnw More links: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Harvey Friedman: The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics 18.05.2026 1h 38min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt to get a Plaud device today - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Harvey Friedman — the youngest professor in Stanford's history, founder of reverse mathematics, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel chose to sponsor his final paper — has spent 60 years on one question: can ordinary, finite math be trusted? His theorems show that even concrete statements involving nothing more exotic than rational numbers cannot be proved or refuted within ZFC. The foundations of mathematics, Friedman argues, are not settled bedrock but vertiginous — made more mysterious, not less, by his own work. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Gödel’s Incompleteness Misinterpretations - 00:09:48 - Woodin vs. Friedman Foundations - 00:17:28 - Category Theory vs. Logic - 00:24:30 - Borel Determinacy Paradoxes - 00:31:23 - Embedded Maximality Principles - 00:41:18 - Tree(3) and Kruskal’s Theorem - 00:47:40 - Finitism and Large Cardinals - 00:53:11 - Divine Consistency and Angels - 01:03:25 - Reverse Mathematics Origins - 01:11:14 - Constructive Logic and Intuitionism - 01:21:17 - Theology and AI Immortality LINKS MENTIONED: - Harvey Friedman Papers: https://u.osu.edu/friedman.8/foundational-adventures/publications/ - Harvey Friedman YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@harveyfriedman4465/videos - Harvey Friedman Chess Club: https://cclchess.com/ - This Man Is About to Blow Up Mathematics [Article]: https://nautil.us/this-man-is-about-to-blow-up-mathematics-236446 - Harvey Lecture at OSU: https://youtu.be/NAGQD-bSXok - Most Abused Theorem in Math [TOE]: https://youtu.be/OH-ybecvuEo - John Norton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Tghl6aS5A3M - Emily Riehl [TOE]: https://youtu.be/mTwvecBthpQ - What Is Infinity? [TOE]: https://youtu.be/rHtqGrtcB1w - Norman Wildberger [TOE]: https://youtu.be/l7LvgvunVCM - Wolfgang Smith [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lF4S_P_o-g0 - Scott Aaronson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/1ZpGCQoL2Rk - Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk - Edward Frenkel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s - Godel Incompleteness Theorems: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ - Consistency of Axiom of Choice [Book]: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.469796/page/18/mode/2up - Independence of Continuum Hypothesis [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/71858 - Borel Determinacy [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1971035 - Paris-Harrington Theorem: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Paris-HarringtonTheorem.html - The God Letter: https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/einstein-letter-gutkind-excerpts.pdf - Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0486669807?tag=toe08-20 - Categories for the Working Mathematician [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1441931236?tag=toe08-20 - On Necessary Use of Abstract Set Theory [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001870881900219 - Borel Set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_set More links: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Janna Levin: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Klein Bottle 11.05.2026 2h 4min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - Go to https://vanman.shop/curt to get 15% off your order - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt to get a Plaud device today - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Janna Levin — Claire Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College, founding Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works, and co-host of Quanta's The Joy of Why — works with Brian Greene to explore whether hidden Klein-bottle dimensions could explain why matter beat antimatter after the Big Bang. The geometry does the work — no fudged parameters. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Universe as Gödel Sentence - 00:05:24 - Unknowable Initial Conditions - 00:10:28 - AI and Non-Computable Consciousness - 00:15:36 - The Hard Problem Paradox - 00:25:25 - Klein Bottle Topology - 00:32:04 - Pin Structures and Chirality - 00:39:56 - Breaking Matter-Antimatter Symmetry - 00:51:26 - Topology and Dark Energy - 00:57:00 - Black Hole Information Paradox - 01:07:04 - ER=EPR and Firewalls - 01:13:37 - Black Holes as Particles - 01:18:42 - Emergent Gravity and Holography - 01:23:43 - Rejecting Physical Infinities - 01:31:41 - Narrative Truth vs. Axioms - 01:41:22 - Insomnia and Mathematical Madness - 01:47:22 - Scientific Mysticism and Honesty - 01:53:34 - Biological Morality and Advice LINKS MENTIONED: - Janna's Substack: jannalevin.substack.com - Janna's Books: amazon.com/stores/author/B001IXTNZQ - Janna's Papers: inspirehep.net/authors/1000438 - Pioneer Works: pioneerworks.org - Whales Don't Want to Go to Mars [Article]: jannalevin.substack.com/p/billions-of-exoplanets-zero-aliens - Black Hole Blues [Book]: amzn.to/4cPOcfr - A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines [Book]: amazon.com/dp/1400032407?tag=toe08-20 - Gödel Incompleteness Theorems: plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness - Gödel Numbering: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering - Wave Function of the Universe [Paper]: isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/Classic%20Papers/Wavefunction%20of%20the%20Universe%20(Hartle%20&%20Hawking).pdf - Janna & Penrose at Oxford: jannalevin.substack.com/p/penrose-and-mein-oxford - Hard Problem of Consciousness [Paper]: consc.net/papers/facing.pdf - Klein Bottle: mathworld.wolfram.com/KleinBottle.html - Klein Bottle Cosmology [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/2511.23447 - Brane-World Motion in Compact Dimensions [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/1103.2174 - Dark Energy & Extra Dimensions [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/0707.1062 - Particle Creation by Black Holes [Paper]: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02345020 - BH Complementarity [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9306069 - Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls? [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123 - Thermodynamics of Spacetime [Paper]: arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9504004 - Most Abused Theorem in Math [TOE]: youtu.be/OH-ybecvuEo - Roger Penrose [TOE]: youtu.be/sGm505TFMbU - Roger Penrose [Part 2]: youtu.be/iO03t21xhdk - Neil Turok [TOE]: youtu.be/zNZCa1pVE20 - David Chalmers [TOE]: youtu.be/5r9V1ryksnw - Brian Greene [TOE]: youtu.be/O2EtTE9Czzo - Leonard Susskind [TOE]: youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok - Ted Jacobson [TOE]: youtu.be/3mhctWlXyV8 - Juan Maldacena [TOE]: youtu.be/6LbRHMvyrik More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• 
  Juan Maldacena: Geometry as Entanglement, and the Emergence of Spacetime 04.05.2026 1h 47min

  SPONSORS: - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Juan Maldacena wrote the most cited paper in theoretical physics, birthing AdS/CFT and realizing holography — and today, the problem keeping him up at night is wormholes. He suspects space-time isn't fundamental at all, that geometry itself might be what entanglement looks like from the inside. The singularity isn't a place, it's a name for everything we don't yet understand. I hope you enjoy it. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Emergent Space-Time Geometry - 00:05:28 - GR and QM Incompatibility - 00:11:52 - The Singularity Problem - 00:17:00 - Extremal Black Hole Thermodynamics - 00:22:00 - The Island Formula - 00:27:30 - Spacetime and Quantum Information - 00:34:15 - ER equals EPR - 00:41:51 - Traversable Wormhole Physics - 00:47:24 - Simulating Wormholes with Qubits - 00:52:53 - Celestial Holography and Symmetries - 00:58:00 - dS/CFT and Dark Energy - 01:04:24 - Quantum Error Correction Codes - 01:10:00 - The Physicist’s Mindset - 01:15:19 - Inflationary Gravity Wave Predictions - 01:21:03 - Clocks and Emergent Time - 01:26:44 - Is Space-Time Doomed? - 01:32:00 - AI in Theoretical Physics - 01:38:00 - Overcoming Academic Inadequacy LINKS MENTIONED: - Juan Maldacena's Website: https://www.ias.edu/sns/malda - Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9711200 - Eternal Black Holes in AdS [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0106112 - Holographic Derivation of Entanglement Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0603001 - Real Observers Solving Imaginary Problems [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14014 - Building Spacetime with Quantum Entanglement [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3035 - Entropy of Bulk Quantum Fields [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08762 - Entanglement Wedge Reconstruction [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08255 - Comments on the Double Cone Wormhole [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11617 - Traversable Wormholes in Four Dimensions [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04726 - JT Gravity as a Matrix Integral [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11115 - Single-Minus Gluon Tree Amplitudes [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12176 - Bulk Locality and Quantum Error Correction [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.7041 - Black Hole Information Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox - Chilloquium 2023 [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/Ow81IJyzmUQ - Erik Verlinde [TOE]: https://youtu.be/ilVImMHcr_g - Leonard Susskind [TOE]: https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok - Edward Frenkel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/RX1tZv_Nv4Y More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  Slavoj Zizek: “Buddhism Can’t Explain This” 27.04.2026 1h 35min

  SPONSORS: - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Slavoj Žižek doesn't answer your question — he dismantles it, rebuilds it, and hands you something stranger and more useful than what you started with. Philosopher, provocateur, and self-described pessimist, he's spent decades insisting on something most thinkers shy away from: that freedom isn't the absence of necessity — it's the moment you choose what you fundamentally are. The fall comes first. Paradise was never real to begin with. Reality is the gap, not the thing on either side of it. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Socrates and Radical Freedom 00:05:02 - Quantum Indeterminacy vs. Freedom 00:10:06 - Ontological Collapse Paradoxes 00:15:07 - Adorno and Social Antinomies 00:20:36 - Democritus: Less Than Nothing 00:25:40 - Sartre and Existential Choice 00:30:45 - Freudian Death Drive 00:36:01 - Heidegger and Hysterical Awareness 00:42:10 - Imp of Perversity 00:48:07 - Einstein vs. Bohr 00:53:15 - God’s Ontological Laziness 00:58:17 - Hegel’s Retroactive Necessity 01:03:41 - Digital Spirituality and AI 01:09:18 - Stalin and Failed Projects 01:14:41 - Hegel in a Wired Brain 01:20:10 - Religious Convictions and Physics 01:25:12 - Zen Buddhism and War LINKS MENTIONED: - Slavoj's Books: https://amazon.com/stores/author/B000APK7P8 - Philosophical Investigations into Human Freedom: https://amazon.com/dp/0791468747?tag=toe08-20 - Freedom: A Disease Without Cure: https://amazon.com/dp/1350559164?tag=toe08-20 - Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1785.pdf - Binding, Minds & the Platonic Realm: https://youtu.be/0BVM0UC28nY - Quantum Healing: https://amazon.com/dp/0553348698?tag=toe08-20 - Republic of Silence: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/12/paris-alive-the-republic-of-silence/656012/ - Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: https://amazon.com/dp/0486434141?tag=toe08-20 - Beyond the Pleasure Principle: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Beyond_P_P.pdf - Philosophy of Spirit: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/jlindex.htm - Hegelian Reading of the New Science of Consciousness: https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2025-08-25/slavoj-zizek.pdf - The Mirror Stage: https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/LacanMirrorStageECRITS.pdf - Being and Time: https://amazon.com/dp/0061575593?tag=toe08-20 - Less Than Nothing: https://amazon.com/dp/1781681279?tag=toe08-20 - The Imp of the Perverse: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Poe_Imp.pdf - Einstein-Bohr Debate: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/bohr.htm - Ages of the World: https://amazon.com/dp/1438474059?tag=toe08-20 - Quantum History: https://amazon.com/dp/135056642X?tag=toe08-20 - Phenomenology of Spirit: https://amazon.com/dp/0198245971?tag=toe08-20 - Philosophy of Right: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/preface.htm - White Holes: https://amazon.com/dp/B0BTKZVJJK?tag=toe08-20 - Science of Logic: https://amazon.com/dp/1542519918?tag=toe08-20 - End of History and the Last Man: https://amazon.com/dp/0743284550?tag=toe08-20 More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices