Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

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This is a podcast about whether AI could discover the laws of physics before we do. Hirosi Ooguri, chair of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, joins for his first English podcast to explain why AI has moved faster in mathematics than in physics. He fears it could solve physics in a way we cannot understand. We discuss why quantum field theory lacks a firm mathematical foundation, quantum gravity as the “final boss,” the swampland distance conjecture he proposed with Cumrun Vafa, and his estimate that, left to humans, verifying string theory could take 2,250 years. The conversation also covers the PhD thesis numbers that turned up in a Mathieu group table twenty years later. What an honor.

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TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - Measuring Earth in Fifth Grade
- 06:58 - Why Physics, Not Platonic Math?
- 12:34 - Nothing Below the Planck Length?
- 23:15 - Why AI Can't Verify Physics
- 30:47 - Yang-Mills: Hardest Millennium Problem
- 36:31 - Why QFT Resists Rigor
- 46:19 - What If Yang-Mills Fails?
- 52:35 - Are LLMs Just Grad Students?
- 01:01:09 - Swampland and AdS/CFT
- 01:12:57 - Gravity Breaks Wilson's Paradigm
- 01:21:45 - Will AI Surpass Physicists?
- 01:26:58 - 2,250 Years to Verify Strings?
- 01:34:03 - Is String Theory Disappointing?
- 01:40:27 - Distance Conjecture and Inflation
- 01:46:24 - Mathieu Moonshine Discovery
- 01:52:59 - What Would Make Him Quit Strings?
- 02:02:28 - Days of Blank Paper

LINKS:
- Hirosi Ooguri [Caltech PMA]: https://www.pma.caltech.edu/people/hiroshi-hirosi-ooguri-oguri
- On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0605264
- Non-Supersymmetric AdS and the Swampland, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01533
- Constraints on Symmetry From Holography, Harlow & Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05337
- Continuous Family of CFTs and Exactly Marginal Operators, Komatsu et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11045
- Universal Bounds on CFT Distance Conjecture, Ooguri & Wang [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00674
- Notes on the K3 Surface and the Mathieu Group M24, Eguchi, Ooguri & Tachikawa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.0956
- Exploring the Holographic Entropy Cone via Reinforcement Learning, He, Lee & Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19979
- The Holographic Entropy Cone, Bao et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07839
- De Sitter Space and the Swampland, Obied et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08362
- Knot Invariants and Topological Strings, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9912123
- Topological Lattice Models in Four Dimensions, Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9205090
- Kodaira-Spencer Theory of Gravity and Exact Results for Quantum String Amplitudes [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9309140

Full reading list for this episode (all 103 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com

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This is Part One of a lecture where, as with Tim Maudlin, the professor was given unlimited time, so you can pause and check the derivations yourself. Philip Mannheim, professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, joins to explain why he traces dark matter, dark energy and quantum gravity to one cause: stretching Newton and Einstein beyond the solar system. We discuss the planet Vulcan that was never there, why dwarf galaxies are a bigger clue than spirals, the Tully-Fisher relation, and his fits to 138 galaxies with no dark matter. The conversation also covers general relativity from scratch, from metrics to the Riemann tensor, and whether Einstein’s equations are unique. Part Two is still to come.

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TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - Three Dark Problems, One Cause?
- 08:31 - The 120-Order Cosmological Catastrophe
- 13:17 - Newton, Kepler, and Ptolemy
- 21:29 - Mercury's Anomalous Precession
- 27:20 - Neptune Found, Vulcan Vanished
- 34:12 - Galactic Rotation Curves
- 40:00 - Dwarf Galaxies Break Universality
- 45:48 - Where Are the WIMPs?
- 52:00 - Tully-Fisher: Galaxies Know
- 58:06 - Four Parameters, 138 Galaxies
- 01:06:00 - Milgrom's Law and the RAR
- 01:12:10 - Fourth-Order Poisson Equation
- 01:20:28 - Missing Mass in Plain Sight
- 01:26:13 - Confirmed Low-Acceleration Prediction
- 01:33:00 - Metrics From Scratch
- 01:39:00 - Why Einstein Changed Newton
- 01:44:31 - Riemann Tensor: Real Gravity
- 01:49:50 - Equivalence Principle Derived
- 01:55:00 - Building Einstein's Equations
- 02:00:54 - Light Bending and Ricci Flatness
- 02:07:45 - Are Einstein's Equations Unique?

LINKS:
- Dark Matter and Dark Energy Alternatives [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505266
- The Case for Conformal Gravity [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.2186
- Conformal Gravity at Low Acceleration [Paper]: https://inspirehep.net/literature/3155698
- Conformal Gravity's Newtonian Limit [Paper]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02105226
- Quadratic Potential and Galactic Rotation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0970
- Universal Rotation Curves and Tully-Fisher [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03921
- Local and Global Gravity [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9611038
- Fitting Galactic Rotation Curves [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3495
- Dwarf-Galaxy Radial Acceleration [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06905
- MOND Theory [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.7661
- MOG, Cosmology and Black Holes [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.12550
- High-Resolution Rotation Curves of LSB Galaxies [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0107326
- Dark Matter: Fact or Fantasy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11217

Full reading list for this episode (all 31 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com

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Math has a proof checker. Can physics get one? Jonathan Gorard, an applied mathematician and the cofounder and CEO of Lanyon AI, joins to explain why AI took off in math and coding but not yet in physics. We discuss an AI finishing the formal check of a Fields Medal proof and why it scared him, why he thinks “I detected a particle” rests on 20 to 50 levels of theory, and what Alan Turing’s PhD student Robin Gandy tried to build for physics. The conversation also covers his push to make physics executable, why he thinks mysteries are artifacts of description languages, and whether there is still a place for the physicist.

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TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - The Sphere Packing Shock
- 05:53 - Science as Product vs Process
- 11:20 - Is Science Just Hedonism?
- 20:56 - Why Academics Ignored AI
- 31:54 - Why Leave Princeton?
- 39:56 - Turing's Student and Physics Formalization
- 44:56 - Theory-Ladenness of Observation
- 50:22 - Why Math Isn't Enough
- 58:19 - Sapir-Whorf for AI
- 01:05:49 - Filtering the Paper Deluge
- 01:12:07 - Can AI Transmit Understanding?
- 01:19:38 - Human-Readable AI Reasoning
- 01:25:59 - Must AI Be Embodied?
- 01:31:50 - Mysteries Are Description Language Artifacts
- 01:41:54 - Grieving Physics
- 01:49:59 - What's Left for Physicists?
- 01:55:18 - The Next Description Language
- 02:02:26 - Spacetime Discreteness and Beacons

LINKS:
- Jonathan Gorard [Wolfram Physics Project]: https://www.wolframphysics.org/pages/people/jonathan-gorard/
- Lanyon AI: https://www.lanyon.ai/
- Lanyon AI Founding Team: https://www.lanyon.ai/company/
- Shock with Confidence: Formal Proofs of Correctness for Hyperbolic PDE Solvers [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13877
- BEACONS: Bounded-Error, Algebraically-Composable Neural Solvers for PDEs [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14853
- General Relativistic Hydrodynamics in Discrete Spacetime [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.02331
- The Empirical Metamathematics of Euclid and Beyond [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.07337v1
- Math Inc. Sphere Packing Announcement: https://www.math.inc/sphere-packing
- The Sphere Packing Problem in Dimension 8 [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.04246
- Progress in Formalizing Sphere Packing in Dimension 8 [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.23468
- On Axiomatic Systems in Mathematics and Theories in Physics [Paper]: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ohad.kammar/scans/gandy-thesis-ocr.pdf
- Hilbert's Sixth Problem: Axioms of Physics [Paper]: https://people.reed.edu/~davidp/341/resources/hilbert.pdf
- Hilbert's Program [SEP]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-program/
- On Computable Numbers [Paper]: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf
- Lean Proof Assistant [Wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(proof_assistant)
- The Lean Mathematical Library [Paper]: https://leanprover-community.github.io/papers/mathlib-paper.pdf

Full reading list for this episode (all 114 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com

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This is a podcast on gravity, from the ringing of black holes to the number 0.04. Olaf Dreyer, a theoretical physicist who did his PhD with Abhay Ashtekar and now works in finance, joins to explain how he thinks spacetime and matter emerged together. We discuss black hole spectroscopy, the test he and his collaborators proposed and LIGO later ran. Olaf found that 0.04 in a condensed matter textbook, the same value as the tilt of the cosmic microwave background. He argues this means our world began in a phase transition, and he sketches a new way to implement the equivalence principle. The conversation also covers Robert Laughlin’s bucket of water, what banking taught Olaf about funding physics, and consciousness.

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TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - Ashtekar's Failure Slide
- 12:12 - String Theory's Carbon Copies
- 19:47 - Don't Kill Ideas Early
- 24:51 - Black Hole Spectroscopy Origins
- 33:55 - Coherent States Critique
- 42:51 - What Counts as Quantum Gravity?
- 52:10 - Can AI Truly Create?
- 1:02:17 - Consciousness Beyond the Hamiltonian
- 1:07:44 - Emergence and the "Little I"
- 1:14:16 - Strange Loops and Experience
- 1:20:17 - Laughlin's Bucket of Water
- 1:27:29 - Cosmological Constant Problem
- 1:36:56 - The 0.04 Coincidence
- 1:42:26 - Just Numerology?
- 1:48:53 - Rethinking the Equivalence Principle
- 1:55:38 - Gravity as Gauge Symmetry
- 2:05:35 - Don't Be Arrogant About Tools
- 2:11:41 - Narrowing Before Collapse
- 2:17:34 - How Perimeter Became Normal
- 2:23:34 - Next Generation's Burden

LINKS:
- The World Is Discrete [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.6169
- Black Hole Spectroscopy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0309007
- Quasinormal Modes, the Area Spectrum, and Black Hole Entropy [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0211076
- Olaf's Papers: https://inspirehep.net/authors/1021936
- Principles of Condensed Matter Physics [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0521794501?tag=toe08-20
- A Different Universe [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/046503828X?tag=toe08-20
- AQFT: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/
- LIGO Black Hole Collision Sound: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2
- LISA: https://lisa.nasa.gov/
- Lee Samuel Finn: https://web.archive.org/web/20141020034610/http://gwastro.org/us/lee-samuel-finn
- Rob Laughlin: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1998/laughlin/facts/
- DESY: https://desy.de/index_eng.html

Full reading list for this episode (all 61 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com

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This episode is about what physics says is there when nobody is looking, including time itself. Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Surrey, joins to argue that the arrow of time is fundamental. Entropy increases because the arrow already points that way, and not the other way around. We discuss why he thinks the measurement problem is taught badly. He wants Bohmian mechanics to be right without claiming that it is, since the price is Einstein’s special relativity. He calls the past hypothesis a cheat. The conversation also covers the block universe, where he parts ways with Carlo Rovelli, and why he wants thermodynamics in the search for quantum gravity. I hope you enjoy.

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TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00:00 - Quantum Measurement Problem
- 08:44 - Realist Quantum Interpretations
- 18:19 - Scientific Empathy and Explanation
- 30:19 - Electron's Ontological State
- 41:05 - Minkowski's Block Universe
- 51:59 - Flow vs. Arrow of Time
- 1:01:01 - Entropy and Past Hypothesis
- 1:14:56 - Rovelli and Emergent Time
- 1:25:40 - Incomplete vs. Approximate Physics
- 1:31:57 - Causal Set Theory

LINKS:
- Jim Al-Khalili's Website: https://www.jimal-khalili.com/
- On Time [Book]: https://amzn.to/46PNLxK
- Jim Al-Khalili's Channel [Video]: https://www.youtube.com/@UnbaffledScience
- Quantum Reality Series [Video]: https://youtu.be/sivQ-jbZ2oM
- The Decoherent Arrow of Time and the Entanglement Past Hypothesis [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03418
- Block Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
- Copenhagen Interpretation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/
- Many Worlds: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/
- Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/
- Bell's Theorem: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/
- Collapse Theories: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-collapse/
- Schrödinger's Cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
- Loschmidt's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschmidt%27s_paradox
- Thermodynamic Asymmetry in Time: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-thermo/
- Space and Time [Paper]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Space_and_Time
- The Strangest Man [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/B002LDM8QS?tag=toe08-20
- Beyond the Quantum [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0198853742?tag=toe08-20
- The Selfish Gene [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/B01GI5F2FS?tag=toe08-20
- Universe Today Article: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/quantum-physicist-takes-aim-at-the-universes-mysterious-arrow-of-time

Full reading list for this episode (all 37 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com

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