Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

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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
- Scott Aaronson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/1ZpGCQoL2Rk
- David Deutsch [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vKeWv-cdWkM
- Peter Woit & Joseph Conlon [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fAaXk_WoQqQ

More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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