Theories of Everything
Read bullet-point summaries of Theories of Everything on physics, consciousness, quantum theory, mathematics, AI, cosmology, and reality.
Episodes
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What is Existence, Exactly?
This episode explores the philosophical puzzle of existence through the lens of the "Batman paradox," questioning what it means to claim something exists or
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The Unsettling Illusion of Time
Professor Simon Saunders, Emeritus Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, is a leading philosopher of physics who works on the nature of time, the Everettian (many
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What is the “Nature of Reality”?
This episode, from the podcast Theories of Everything, explores what it means to investigate the "nature of reality" — a phrase the host uses to signal inquiry
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Neil Turok: A New Route to Quantum Gravity (Without Strings)
Neil Turok presents a new approach to quantum gravity that challenges the dominant paradigm requiring strings and extra dimensions, instead reviving a simpler
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The Man Behind AI Safety Thinks AI Is Conscious
Roman Yampolskiy is a computer scientist and one of the earliest voices in AI safety, having popularized the field around 2010. He is known for arguing that
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The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics
Harvey Friedman is a legendary figure in mathematical logic — the youngest professor ever listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (appointed at Stanford at
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Klein Bottle | Janna Levin
Janna Levin on the deep links between mathematics, cosmology, and self-referentiality
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AdS/CFT | Juan Maldacena
Professor Juan Maldacena, one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the past three decades, discusses the deep connections between quantum
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Freedom, Buddhism, Quantum Physics, Consciousness | Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Žižek discusses freedom, quantum mechanics, consciousness, and spirituality, weaving together Hegel, Schelling, Sartre, Lacan, and modern physics into a
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Consciousness, Irreducibility, and the Local to Global
Curt Jaimungal's talk challenges intellectual complacency, especially the overuse of philosophical slogans and metaphors, arguing that many widely repeated
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Hawking's Co-Author on Why Reductionism Is Dead
George Ellis — a cosmologist who co-authored the Hawking-Ellis The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time and worked closely with Stephen Hawking — argues that
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The Physicist Who Uncovered "Negative" Time
Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) leads experiments on how long particles spend inside barriers and media, and his group has measured quantities with
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If you have imposter syndrome, watch this.
This episode explores why people engaged in intellectual work—students, researchers, self-learners, writers—almost universally feel inadequate, and argues that
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This still disturbs me... (What Is Infinity?)
For over 2,000 years, mathematicians treated infinity as only a process that never completes — you can always add one more, but you never arrive at a finished
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Quantum Mechanics Contradicts Itself (and He Proved It)
Renato Renner, a quantum information theorist at ETH Zurich, has shown that quantum mechanics cannot consistently describe observers who are themselves using
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The "Inverse Problem" Of Dark Matter Is Insane
Dr. Jenny Wagner is a gravitational lensing scientist who argues that most of what counts as evidence for dark matter is driven by model assumptions rather than
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We never knew this until LLMs came along
The central argument: LLMs expose a truth we never had to confront before — that producing text (or any output) was always a proxy for understanding, not
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It's Not That We Don't Know. It's That We Can't.
J.B. Manchak's work reveals that general relativity (GR) is far stranger and more permissive than most physicists acknowledge, and that this permissiveness has
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The Third (Unsettling) Option. Not Determined. Not Random.
General relativity (GR) is often called deterministic, but this is technically false. While the theory is locally deterministic—meaning small patches of
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The Physicist Rethinking the Hard Problem
The episode centers on physicist Nir Lahav's "relativistic theory of consciousness," which proposes that consciousness is not generated by the brain but is a
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Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Wrong About Beliefs
The episode dismantles the claim—popular among prominent scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson—that they "don't believe anything," arguing it is either trivially
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The 2,300 Year Old Mistake About Mathematics
This episode features a deep conversation with a mathematician (who goes by David) who left a tenured, permanent research-only position at CNRS to write and
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This Physicist (Unexpectedly) Derived Gravity from Information
Erik Verlinde is a leading theoretical physicist who argues that gravity is not a fundamental force but a thermodynamic, emergent phenomenon arising from
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This Cosmologist Discovered Something Strange...
Vitaly Vanchurin, a cosmologist, proposes that the universe is best modeled as a neural network—not merely simulated by one, but fundamentally described by its
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What If the Wave Function Describes Knowledge?
Rob Speckins' research program challenges the standard narrative about what makes quantum mechanics truly "quantum." Most physicists believe that phenomena like
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Subir Sarkar: Why Dark Energy is a Local Illusion
In 1998, two teams of astronomers observed that distant Type Ia supernovae appeared about 30% fainter than expected, interpreting this as evidence that the
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“If I’m Right, There Is No Theory of Everything”
Stuart Kauffman, a founder of complexity theory and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, argues that the deepest assumption underlying Western science — that
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Philosophy’s Most Formidable Living Mind
Timothy Williamson, Oxford's Wykeham Professor of Logic and one of the most cited living philosophers, joins Curt Jaimungal for a wide-ranging conversation that
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Quantum Gravity: Why We Already Found The Answer
Professor John Donoghue argues that quantum mechanics and general relativity are not fundamentally incompatible — the popular narrative of their conflict is
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Bas van Fraassen: Why Science Doesn't Reveal Reality
Bas van Fraassen is one of the most influential living philosophers of science, best known for his 1980 book The Scientific Image, which challenged the dominant
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A Bold New Test of Gravity: Roger Penrose Λ Ivette Fuentes
This episode features Sir Roger Penrose and Professor Ivette Fuentes discussing a new atom interferometer experiment by Ron Folman, its implications for whether
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The Most Terrifying Philosopher I’ve Encountered
Curt Jaimungal explores Søren Kierkegaard's three stages of life — aesthetic, ethical, and religious — as a framework for understanding why modern people feel
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The Physicist Whose Predictions Keep Getting Verified
Professor Ivette Fuentes is a theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton (and a fellow at Keble College, Oxford) who works at the intersection of
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Can Physics Explain Its Own Laws?
The question "why do physical laws have their specific form?" is a philosophical trap: any attempt to explain the laws of physics must itself rely on some law
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Roger Penrose: "My Crazy Idea That Explains the Universe"
Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate in physics, challenges two pillars of modern physics: the standard cosmological model and the completeness of quantum
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The Signal That Fooled Neuroscience for Decades
For decades, the Libet experiment has been interpreted as evidence that free will is an illusion: the brain's "readiness potential" — a slow buildup of neural
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Why I Don't Buy the Simulation Hypothesis
Curt Jaimungal, a mathematical physicist and host of the podcast Theories of Everything, delivers a lecture at Niagara University's Peggy and John Day
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Yakir Aharonov: “Heisenberg Was Right and We Ignored Him”
Yakir Aharonov, co-discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect and pioneer of weak measurement theory, has spent 65 years developing a radical reinterpretation of
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The Multiverse May Be Real | David Deutsch
David Deutsch argues that modern academic institutions and grant systems are structurally hostile to fundamental research, favoring incremental work over
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A 2 Hour Deep Dive into Entropy
This episode is a two-hour deep dive into entropy and the second law of thermodynamics with Professor Wayne Myrvold, who explains that entropy is not a single
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Your Brain Isn’t a Computer and That Changes Everything
Neuroscientist Anil Seth and biologist Michael Levin discuss why the brain-as-computer metaphor has limited our understanding of consciousness, and how their
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DMT Entities Decoded by Coupled Oscillators
Andres Gomez Emilsson, co-founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), presents a new mathematical framework for modeling psychedelic perception using
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Stephen Wolfram's Radical Theory of Everything
Stephen Wolfram discusses his philosophy and methodology for doing good science, drawing on decades of work across computer science, fundamental physics
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Max Tegmark Says Physics Just Swallowed AI
Max Tegmark argues that AI has become part of physics, just as electromagnetism, atoms, and black holes once were, and that intelligence, memory, and eventually
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Why Matthieu Pageau Sees Satan as God's Hacker
Matthieu Pageau — a Canadian thinker, writer, and self-described "exile" — discusses his project of understanding reality through biblical symbolism, internal
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Frederic Schuller: The Physicist Who Derived Gravity From Electromagnetism
Frederic Schuller is a theoretical physicist and celebrated teacher known for deriving Einstein's general relativity from Maxwell's electromagnetism alone — not
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The Nobel Laureate Who (Also) Says Quantum Theory Is "Totally Wrong"
Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft argues that quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong — not because its predictions fail (they are spectacularly accurate) but
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Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Wrong About Philosophy
Philosophy is already embedded in physics, whether physicists realize it or not — Curt Jaimungal and John Norton (Professor of Philosophy and Physics) argue
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Dirac's 90-Year-Old "Mistake" Unifies All of Physics
Causal fermion systems (CFS) is a candidate theory of everything developed over 30+ years by mathematician-physicist Felix Finster, starting from a radical
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The (Terrifying) Theory That Your Thoughts Were Never Your Own
Language as an alien organism in the brain — Professors Elan Barenholtz and William Hahn argue that language is not a tool we use but an autonomous
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New Structures Found Within Quantum Field Theory
Professor Nikita Nekrasov is a theoretical physicist whose work has unified previously disconnected areas of mathematics and physics — instanton moduli spaces
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The Physics of Free Will: A Radical New Theory
Jenann Ismael, a philosopher of physics, argues that free will is not only compatible with physics but is a natural consequence of how physics actually
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Brand New Result Proving Penrose & Tao's Uncomputability in Physics!
This episode features mathematician Eva Miranda presenting new results connecting computability theory, fluid dynamics, and geometry, building on ideas from
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The Physicist Who Found Quantum Theory's Unnoticed Assumption
This episode features Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes (the third in a series of conversations with host Curt Jaimungal) explaining his "indivisible stochastic"
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The 300-Year-Old Physics Mistake No One Noticed
This is a wide-ranging conversation with John Norton, philosopher of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, who has spent decades challenging assumptions
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Harvard Physicists Expose Fatal Flaws in Many Worlds
This is a wide-ranging philosophy-of-physics conversation between Emily Adlam and Jacob Barandes (Harvard), hosted by Curt Jaimungal, in which two
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The Debate That Divides Physics: Is the Universe a Coincidence or a Dictatorship?
This episode is a debate about what "laws of physics" fundamentally are — not which specific laws are true, but the metaphysical status of lawhood itself. Two
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Language Without Meaning: How LLMs Exposed Our Biggest Illusion
This episode is a long conversation with Professor Elan Barenholtz (Florida Atlantic University), who argues that large language models have accidentally
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![What is “Energy,” Actually? [Graduate Level] episode](/images/podcasts/theories-of-everything/episodes/2025-06-05--what-is-energy-actually-graduate-level.jpg)
What is “Energy,” Actually? [Graduate Level]
This episode argues a provocative thesis about general relativity (GR): energy, one of physics' supposedly bedrock concepts, is not just hard to conserve in
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Geometric Unity: Unifying All Forces + Generations | Eric Weinstein
Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity (GU) is a proposed "theory of everything" that attempts to derive the full complexity of the Standard Model and general
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The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, is one of the leading defenders of the Everett (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum
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The AI Math That Left Number Theorists Speechless
Professor Yang-Hui He discusses the rapidly evolving role of AI in pure mathematics and theoretical physics, focusing on a new paradigm where AI assists in
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The Dangerous Lie About Understanding
The popular claim that "if you can't explain it to a 5-year-old, you don't understand it" — often misattributed to Einstein — is not only false but actively
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MIT Scientist's Discovery: "Black Holes Might Be Dark Matter!"
Primordial black holes (PBHs) as a unifying lens in physics — MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser uses primordial black holes as a central topic that
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The Most Abused Theorem in Math (Gödel's Incompleteness)
Gödel's incompleteness theorem is widely misused in pop-science to claim fundamental limits on human knowledge, consciousness, or physics — but this is a
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The Physicist Who Proved Entropy = Gravity
In 1995, physicist Ted Jacobson demonstrated that Einstein's field equations of general relativity can be derived from thermodynamic principles applied to the
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Nothing But Ratios: The Universe Barbour Discovered
Physicist Julian Barbour proposes that the universe is built purely from ratios — relationships between particles — with no absolute space, time, or scale. He
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In-depth Explanation of Eric Weinstein’s “Geometric Unity”
Geometric Unity (GU) is Eric Weinstein's proposed "theory of everything" — a framework that attempts to unify general relativity (gravity) with the Standard
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The Most Astonishing Theory of Black Holes
Neil Turok presents "black mirrors" — a radical rethinking of black holes that eliminates their interiors entirely, replacing the conventional picture of
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Why Universal Skepticism Is Philosophy's Greatest Deception
Philosopher Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) argues that universal skepticism—the idea that we can't truly know anything—is itself a cognitive illusion
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Debunking Veritasium: The “All Possible Paths” Myth & What Feynman Really Showed
Curt Jaimungal debunks the viral claim—popularized by Veritasium—that quantum particles literally take "all possible paths" simultaneously, arguing this
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The "All At Once" Universe Shatters Our View of Time
Physicist and philosopher Emily Adlam argues that the deepest assumption in modern physics — that the universe evolves forward in time from an initial state
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The Physicist Who Broke an "Unbreakable" Rule | Claudia de Rham
Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, is the co-creator of massive gravity — a theory in which the graviton, the particle that
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Extraordinary Advances in Artificial Intelligence Medicine…
This episode is a panel discussion from the Polymath Medical Salon at Florida Atlantic University's Gruber AI Sandbox, moderated by Curt Jaimungal (host of
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Emily Riehl Makes Infinity Categories Elementary
Emily Riehl presents a vision for making infinity category theory accessible to undergraduates by replacing traditional set-theoretic foundations with homotopy
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Will Humanity Pass “The Great Filter”? | Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and researcher at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, is best known for coining the "Great Filter"
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This New Tech Revolutionizes Biology... | Michael Levin
Dr. Michael Levin's research at Tufts University reveals that bioelectric signaling—electrical communication between cells via ion channels and gap
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This Scientist Explains How the Universe Emerges from Nothing
Urs Schreiber presents a sweeping vision in which the fundamental structures of physics—spacetime, fermions, supergravity, and even M-theory—emerge from pure
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Harvard Scientist Rewrites the Rules of Quantum Mechanics | Scott Aaronson Λ Jacob Barandes
This episode features a debate between Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes and computer scientist Scott Aaronson about the foundations of quantum mechanics, the
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The Science of New States of Consciousness | Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Andrés Gómez Emilsson is the director of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) and a researcher focused on mathematically modeling consciousness, valence (the
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The Complete Consciousness Iceberg | 2 Hours of Obscure Consciousness Theories Explained
This episode is the second installment of Curt Jaimungal's "Consciousness Iceberg" series on Theories of Everything, structured in layers of increasing depth
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Top Economist on Academia's Flawed System & How AI Will Transform It | Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen, an economist and public intellectual, discusses tariffs, academia's structural flaws, AI's transformative potential, and the importance of
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Harvard Scientist: "There is No Quantum Multiverse" | Jacob Barandes
This is the second part of a wide-ranging conversation between Curt Jaimungal and Jacob Barandes, a theoretical physicist at Harvard and co-director of graduate
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This Controversial Theory Shatters Our View of Reality... | Michael Levin Λ Karl Friston
This episode features a deep conversation between Curt Jaimungal, biologist Michael Levin, and neuroscientist Karl Friston about the nature of information
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Top AI Scientist Unifies Wolfram, Leibniz, & Consciousness | William Hahn
William Hahn returns to the MIT Media Lab to discuss how consciousness, computation, and language might converge in modern AI, drawing on Stephen Wolfram's
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Retrocausality & The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics | Ruth Kastner
The episode explores the transactional interpretation (TI) of quantum mechanics, developed by physicist-philosopher Ruth Kastner as a response to the persistent
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Harvard Physicist Debunks (Literal) Particle Superposition | Jacob Barandes Λ Manolis Kellis
This is a salon-style discussion hosted by MIT computational biologist Manolis Kellis, featuring Harvard theoretical physicist and philosopher Jacob Barandas
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Why Physics Without Philosophy Is Deeply Broken... | Jacob Barandes
Jacob Barandes, a theoretical physicist and philosopher at Harvard, argues that modern physics has become deeply broken by abandoning philosophy, and he
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Consciousness Beyond the Brain & Self | Michael Levin Λ Anna Ciaunica
Developmental biologist Michael Levin and cognitive scientist Anna Ciaunica challenge foundational assumptions about consciousness, memory, and the self
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Geometric Quantization: The Bridge from Classical to Quantum | Eva Miranda
Eva Miranda, a geometer and professor at the University of Barcelona, presents a lecture on geometric quantization — a mathematical framework that bridges
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Why The "Godfather of AI" Now Fears His Own Creation | Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and former Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google, is one of the foundational architects of
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The Hardest Question No Religion Can Answer...
David Bentley Hart on the problem of evil, the resurrection, and the nature of reality: Hart, a theist and translator of the New Testament, considers the
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This is the New AI Mathematician... | Yang-Hui He
Yang-Hui He, a mathematical physicist whose work sits at the interface of algebraic geometry and string theory, explains how AI and machine learning are
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String Theory's Biggest Critic Debates String Theorist...
This episode is a debate between Peter Woit (Columbia University, author of Not Even Wrong and a leading critic of string theory) and Joseph Conlon (Oxford
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Is The Universe Conscious? | Matt Segall
This episode traces the history of Western philosophy from Plato through to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, exploring how our understanding of
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An (Elementary) Introduction to Quantum Computing and No-go Theorems | Maria Violaris
This episode is an introductory yet technically precise overview of quantum no-go theorems, delivered by Maria Violaris, a recent PhD graduate in quantum
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The Major Flaws in (Fundamental) Physics | Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine Hossenfelder discusses the stagnation in fundamental physics, distinguishing it from a broader "crisis" in science, and argues that the lack of progress
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Matter and Mind: Rethinking Consciousness with Iain McGilchrist
Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, discusses the practical implications of his work on brain
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The Universe Writes Itself Into Existence Moment by Moment
Physicist Avshalom Elitzur, known for the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-testing experiment, presents a new, not-yet-published framework that unifies quantum mechanics
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The Physicist Who Says Time Doesn't Exist
Physicist Julian Barbour, working independently outside academia for over 50 years from a farmhouse near Oxford, has developed "shape dynamics" — a theory that
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There’s No Wave Function? | Jacob Barandes
This episode features physicist Jacob Barandes of Harvard University, who proposes a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics: there is no fundamental wave
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MIT Scientist on Unifying Cognition and Biology | Manolis Kellis
This episode is an in-person conversation at MIT between host Curt Jaimungal and computational biologist Manolis Kellis (MIT and the Broad Institute), centered
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The Groundbreaking Quantum Gravity Experiment
Oxford physicists Chiara Marletto and Vlatko Vedral have proposed a feasible experiment called gravitationally-induced entanglement (GIE) that could provide the
