Curt Jaimungal
@TOEwithCurt • 60,686 subscribers
Exploring theories of everything, consciousness, Ai, and God. Early access episodes: https://t.co/9HHWJeJbKw For business inquiries: [email protected]
Videos
When Michael Levin (Michael Levin) planned to change the voltage of embryo cells, someone wrote to his postdoc mentor saying he’d had a mental breakdown. Membrane voltage was thought to be mere housekeeping. Then a graduate student found the embryos covered in black dots. They were eyes. Full episode:
Curt Jaimungal36,607 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
Sean Carroll (Sean Carroll) doesn’t care whether a new theory comes from an actor or a physics PhD. He cares whether its author understands the theory it would replace, the Standard Model. His advice: open by saying why physicists will be skeptical, then show why those reasons don’t apply. Full episode:
Curt Jaimungal31,070 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
This episode is about math after AI started solving its open problems. Scott Aaronson, director of the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, joins to explain why there is no making this go away. We discuss who gets credit for AI proofs, what is left for PhD students, and OpenAI’s apparent proof of the unique games conjecture. His wife, the complexity theorist Dana Moshkovitz, has worked on that conjecture since they met. The conversation also covers whether a lab that proved P equals NP should release it, and how AI overturned a conjecture he and Greg Kuperberg posed, with consequences for black hole firewalls. We end with Maxwell’s demon and why he thinks integrated information theory is wrong.
Curt Jaimungal15,683 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
Huge news... I've been working on something assiduously and secretly since last year. It's been several months in the making, with several rewrites and several re-edits. It's finally ready to be released, thus shadow dropping it now. It's a 3-hour iceberg on 's Geometric Unity. I work on understanding and explaining different Theories of Everything for a living, and this one is unlike any other you've seen. This iceberg covers the graduate-level math, but it also constantly provides explainers aimed at different levels for those who are uninitiated with physics and differential geometry. Enjoy.
Curt Jaimungal401,429 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Math has a proof checker. Can physics get one? Jonathan Gorard 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.
Curt Jaimungal30,955 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Harvey Friedman — the youngest professor in Stanford's history, founder of reverse mathematics, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel personally chose to sponsor his final paper — has spent 60 years on a single, audacious question: can ordinary, finite math be trusted? His theorems suggest otherwise, showing that even the most concrete and natural mathematical statements — involving nothing more exotic than rational numbers — cannot be proved or refuted within the gold standard of mathematical foundations, ZFC. The foundations of mathematics, Friedman argues, are not settled bedrock but something far more vertiginous: totally up in the air, and made more mysterious, not less, by his own work.
Curt Jaimungal113,554 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Roger Penrose, staying the night in Cambridge, told Stephen Hawking about black hole area increase. The next morning Hawking phoned him, while Penrose was still in bed, with a new use for it: an inequality for two colliding black holes. Penrose says Hawking wrote it up without crediting him, though he later admitted where the idea came from. “It really should have been a joint paper.” Full episode:
Curt Jaimungal28,169 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
This is a podcast about whether AI could discover the laws of physics before we do. Hirosi Ooguri 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.
Curt Jaimungal14,529 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
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.
Curt Jaimungal50,690 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
In January, Jonathan Gorard (Jonathan Gorard) was confident AI couldn’t produce a machine-checked Lean proof of Maryna Viazovska’s Fields Medal sphere-packing result before late 2027. By March, one existed. He says the real story turned out to be complicated. Full episode:
Curt Jaimungal15,008 Aufrufe • vor 22 Tagen
This is an interview with Stuart Kauffman, one of the founders of complexity theory. He invented random Boolean networks at only 23 years old and helped establish the Santa Fe Institute. Now 86, he makes a striking claim: there is no theory of everything. Kauffman argues that biological evolution creates genuinely new possibilities that cannot be deduced from prior states—paralleling the ancient Chinese Tao more than Plato's Logos. He also believes he's found something new in quantum gravity (and, in his words, "genuinely huge"). He unveils it here for the first time.
Curt Jaimungal118,455 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
What if the universe isn’t built on spacetime but something deeper? In this rare, unscripted conversation, Eric Weinstein () reveals the core of Geometric Unity, his decades-in-the-making theory. For the first time, Weinstein opens up fully about dark matter, the missing generations, peer review, and the potential flake of GU that quietly changed the world. This is the theory he believes is the answer. Full episode🔗 below
Curt Jaimungal170,850 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Physicist Yakir Aharonov argues that the standard story of quantum mechanics is wrong, proposing a time-symmetric “two-state vector” view in which reality is defined by wavefunctions from both past and future. He explains weak measurements (information without collapse), nonlocal dynamics behind interference, and phenomena like the “quantum Cheshire Cat.” Aharonov recounts the birth of the Aharonov–Bohm effect, why gauge potentials mislead about locality, and how pre and post-selection restore causal insight without determinism. He shares memories of Bohm, Heisenberg, and Feynman, touches on gravitational and non-Abelian AB analogs, and lays out why a clear narrative—not just math—is essential to understanding quantum theory.
Curt Jaimungal106,417 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
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.
Curt Jaimungal42,877 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose dismantles standard cosmology, arguing the Big Bang wasn't the beginning and quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong. He then connects a real, gravitational wave function collapse to the non-computational nature of consciousness and why today's AI can't truly understand.
Curt Jaimungal86,995 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Professor Elan Barenholtz, cognitive scientist at Florida Atlantic University, joins TOE to discuss one of the most unsettling ideas in cognitive science: that language is a self-contained, autoregressive system with no inherent connection to the external world. In this mind-altering episode, he explains why AI’s mastery of language without meaning forces us to rethink the nature of mind, perception, and reality itself... full episode🔗below
Curt Jaimungal112,287 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
What do Neil deGrasse Tyson and Deepak Chopra have in common? Click the reply for the full video...
Curt Jaimungal43,822 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten