September 24, 2020

Juan Maldacena: On Theories of Everything, Blackholes, Wormholes, Inflation, & God vs the Multiverse (#077)

1 hour 22 minutes

Juan Maldacena joined me to discuss his fascinating new paper on human traversable wormholes and other topics in fundamental physics. Join in the chat to participate! We discussed the Multiverse, Black Holes, Wormholes, SETI, Life on Einstein Lane, Interstellar the Movie, and even God! We chatted about his recent paper “HUMANLY TRAVERSABLE WORMHOLES” https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06618 which is based, in part, on this earlier paper: “Traversable wormholes in four dimensions” https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04726

When you sign up for my newsletter, I’ll send you links to download two explanatory talks on these papers.

Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php We also discussed an interesting economic analog to the Higgs Mechanism first elaborated by Dr. Pia Malaney and Dr. Eric Weinstein, explaining gauge theory and electromagnetism. See Juan’s paper “The symmetry and simplicity of the laws of physics and the Higgs boson” here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.6753.pdf . You will also enjoy his video lecture based on that paper here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQF7kkWjVWM

0:00 INTRODUCTION

04:00 Black Holes and Hawking Radiation

08:00 EPR states and Black Holes

13:00 Is faster than light travel possible using Wormholes?

20:30 What happens if you fall into a Solar Mass black hole?

25:30 Is studying wormholes a waste of money and time?

30:00 Why are there so many theories of everything like Weinstein, Wolfram, Lisi?

37:00 Cosmic Microwave Background non-Gaussianties and inflation and the Multiverse

44:00 Why are lower limits in physics so important? 52:00 What experiment or theory would Juan pursue if money was no object?

59:00 What is a gauge theory and how can currency trading in economics explain electromagnetism

1:09:10 What’s a day in the life of a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study?

1:13:40 Juan’s Ethical Will

1:15:00 Juan on God, the Multiverse, aliens and more!

1:18:00 What would Juan put on his monolith?

Juan Martín Maldacena (September 10, 1968 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.

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