Janna Levin is the Claire Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College (Columbia University), founding Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and co-host with Steven Strogatz of Quanta’s The Joy of Why.
Relevant to today, she’s also the co-author, with Brian Greene, Daniel Kabat, and Massimo Porrati, of two new papers about the shape of the universe.
The papers compactify the extra dimensions of the universe on a Klein bottle. The non-orientable topology, it turns out, breaks CP symmetry (for free). This is the first long-form podcast treatment of that work.
Soon, I’m going live on Substack with Prof. Janna Levin in the coming days… You can join and ask questions! Stay watching my notes here to find out when. Should be in a week or so.
In today’s episode, we cover:
The cold open: is the universe a Gödel sentence about itself?
“The shape of space might have a lot to do with the universe that we live in.” Topology as the all-stop shop: possibly dark matter, possibly dark energy…
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