Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

SPONSORS: - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE - 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. Every episode days early, ad-free, plus my essays: https://curtjaimungal.com 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. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.com - Twitter: https://x.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.gg/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 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 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SPONSORS: - Buy your time back. Get 20% off Plaud for Fall Prime Day. For long conversations where every idea matters, Plaud helps you capture what was said and turn it into transcripts, summaries, key insights, and action items — so you can focus on the conversation, not your notes. Get 20% off for a limited time: → http://Plaud.ai/curt — code CURT → https://amzn.to/3Ta04lD — code CURT20PD - Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping with promo code TOE Every episode days early, ad-free, plus my essays: https://curtjaimungal.com 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. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.com - Twitter: https://x.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.gg/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE 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 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. 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: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE 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/ - Mechanics As A General-Relativistic Gauge Field Theory, And Relational Quantization [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19845 Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices