Juan Maldacena wrote the most cited paper in theoretical physics, birthing AdS/CFT and realizing holography. Today, the problem he’s working on is related to wormholes.
We cover:
Whether ER equals EPR is a literal identity
DESI’s hint that dark energy may be time-varying, and why Maldacena says w less than minus one would be “the biggest news in the last hundred years”
When you put one observer with a clock inside the universe, the de Sitter partition function goes from imaginary to real-positive. Basically, the observer is what gives geometry something to count. We need observers for quantum gravity to work.
The quantum extremal surface, the Page curve, and the island formula as one variational principle that resolves Hawking’s information paradox.
Maldacena calling himself “a dinosaur” on AI, and what he is doing about it: a current follow-up project with Alfredo Guevara to a recent Strominger paper that used GPT to derive a new gluon amplitude formula.
And what it means that the architect…
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