Creator

Curt Jaimungal

Long form interviews on theoretical physics, consciousness, and the foundations of reality, with technical depth.

3videos

Did Jung and Tolkien Enter the Same World?

Becca Tarnas, assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, spent a doctorate on a coincidence she could not shake: Carl Jung's Red Book and J.R.R. Tolkien's earliest Middle-earth writings were begun in the same years, illustrated in a startlingly similar hand, and populated by the same figures, a wise old guide (Philemon and Gandalf) and a red eye of evil (the Eye of the Evil One and the Eye of Sauron). Neither man knew the other's work, and both insisted the material was found rather than made. From that puzzle the conversation opens into active imagination as a practice, the exact protocol Tarnas uses to guide workshops into it, whether archetypes are patterns or agents, the difference between psyche and mind, and the line between gnosis and psychosis. It closes on Toni Wolff's role as Jung's thread out of the labyrinth, motherhood as the most profound expanded state Tarnas has entered, and a Leonardo da Vinci passage on shadow that arrived, uninvited, minutes before the interview.

PhilosophyCultureScienceAug 3, 2026

2:58:58

Curt Jaimungal

Quantum Mechanics Explained FROM SCRATCH

Tim Maudlin, philosopher of physics at NYU, was given unlimited time and used it to build EPR from scratch: Einstein's 1905 quantization hypothesis, de Broglie's matter waves, Born's rule, and the Copenhagen doctrine that the wave function is complete. The centerpiece is history almost nobody knows: Einstein's real objection was lodged at the 1927 Solvay conference with a single particle, a pinhole and a hemispherical film, and it was about spooky action at a distance, never about determinism. Maudlin then rebuilds the 1935 EPR argument better than EPR did, showing the criterion of reality is analytic and cannot be denied, that the load bearing premise is a tacit one about causal isolation, and that momentum alone suffices so the entire position half was unnecessary. He closes by dismantling two popular escape hatches, determinism and counterfactual definiteness, and shows why Bohr's published reply was so incoherent that two of its pages sat out of order in the standard anthology for decades without anyone noticing.

PhysicsPhilosophyScienceJul 27, 2026

1:51:54

Curt Jaimungal

This Physicist May Have Just Solved Quantum Gravity

Neil Turok, the Higgs Chair at Edinburgh and former director of the Perimeter Institute, premieres a claim with host Curt Jaimungal that quantum gravity in four dimensions can be understood in a limit with no strings, no extra dimensions, and no multiverse. The vehicle is quadratic gravity, an old renormalizable and asymptotically free theory that was abandoned because of the Ostrogradsky instability and negative norm ghosts. Turok reinterprets the instability as ordinary cosmic expansion, and with his student Sam Bateman keeps the ghosts by working in a Krein space and slightly generalizing the Born rule so probabilities stay positive. The conversation extends to a composite Higgs and the hierarchy problem, the CPT symmetric universe, gravitational entropy and why the cosmos is smooth, the measure problem that Turok says condemns the multiverse, and a candid diagnosis of the health of theoretical physics. Turok adds his own caveat that this is a halfway result, not a finished theory of quantum gravity.

PhysicsSciencePhilosophyJun 22, 2026