Could AI Find Physics We Can’t Understand?

SPONSORS: Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today Our listeners get up to 30% off their entire order at https://undrdog.com Every episode days early, ad-free, plus my essays: https://curtjaimungal.com This is a podcast about whether AI could discover the laws of physics before we do. 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. FOLLOW: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9... Substack: https://curtjaimungal.com Twitter: https://x.com/TOEwithCurt Discord:   / discord   Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_... TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Measuring Earth in Fifth Grade 06:58 - Why Physics, Not Platonic Math? 12:34 - Nothing Below the Planck Length? 23:15 - Why AI Can't Verify Physics 30:47 - Yang-Mills: Hardest Millennium Problem 36:31 - Why QFT Resists Rigor 46:19 - What If Yang-Mills Fails? 52:35 - Are LLMs Just Grad Students? 01:01:09 - Swampland and AdS/CFT 01:12:57 - Gravity Breaks Wilson's Paradigm 01:21:45 - Will AI Surpass Physicists? 01:26:58 - 2,250 Years to Verify Strings? 01:34:03 - Is String Theory Disappointing? 01:40:27 - Distance Conjecture and Inflation 01:46:24 - Mathieu Moonshine Discovery 01:52:59 - What Would Make Him Quit Strings? 02:02:28 - Days of Blank Paper LINKS: Hirosi Ooguri [Caltech PMA]: https://www.pma.caltech.edu/people/hi... On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0605264 Non-Supersymmetric AdS and the Swampland, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01533 Constraints on Symmetry From Holography, Harlow & Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05337 Continuous Family of CFTs and Exactly Marginal Operators, Komatsu et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11045 Universal Bounds on CFT Distance Conjecture, Ooguri & Wang [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00674 Notes on the K3 Surface and the Mathieu Group M24, Eguchi, Ooguri & Tachikawa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1004.0956 Exploring the Holographic Entropy Cone via Reinforcement Learning, He, Lee & Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19979 The Holographic Entropy Cone, Bao et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07839 De Sitter Space and the Swampland, Obied et al. [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08362 Knot Invariants and Topological Strings, Ooguri & Vafa [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9912123 Topological Lattice Models in Four Dimensions, Ooguri [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9205090 Kodaira-Spencer Theory of Gravity and Exact Results for Quantum String Amplitudes [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9309140 Full reading list for this episode (all 103 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science