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String Theory in 2037 | Brian Greene & Edward Witten

Edward Witten, widely regarded as one of the greatest living theoretical physicists, sits down with Brian Greene to explore the deepest questions at the frontiers of modern science. From string theory and quantum gravity to black holes, cosmology, and the nature of consciousness, Witten reflects on what physics has revealed—and what remains profoundly mysterious.

The only physicist to receive the Fields Medal, Witten discusses why unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity has proven so difficult, how string theory forces gravity into its framework, and why decades of progress have still not revealed the fundamental principles underlying the theory. He also examines powerful ideas such as duality, extra dimensions, and the controversial anthropic principle, offering rare insight into how physicists grapple with uncertainty at the edge of human understanding.

The conversation moves beyond equations into philosophy, addressing questions about free will, the quantum measurement problem, and whether consciousness plays a role in how reality is observed. Witten reflects candidly on discovery, doubt, beauty in mathematics, and what it feels like to work at the limits of knowledge.

This discussion is essential viewing for anyone interested in theoretical physics, cosmology, quantum theory, and the future of our understanding of the universe.
This program is part of the Rethinking Reality series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participant: Edward Witten.
Moderator: Brian Greene.

0:00:00 — Introduction: Free Will, Physics, and the Quest to Unify Reality.

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NASA-JAXA XRISM finds elemental bounty in supernova remnant

For the first time, scientists have made a clear X-ray detection of chlorine and potassium in the wreckage of a star using data from the Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft.

The Resolve instrument aboard XRISM, pronounced “crism,” discovered these elements in a supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A or Cas A, for short. The expanding cloud of debris is located about 11,000 light-years away in the northern constellation Cassiopeia.

“This discovery helps illustrate how the deaths of stars and life on Earth are fundamentally linked,” said Toshiki Sato, an astrophysicist at Meiji University in Tokyo. “Stars appear to shimmer quietly in the night sky, but they actively forge materials that form planets and enable life as we know it. Now, thanks to XRISM, we have a better idea of when and how stars might make crucial, yet harder-to-find, elements.”

From Big Bang To AI, Unified Dynamics Enables Understanding Of Complex Systems

Experiments reveal that inflation not only smooths the universe but populates it with a specific distribution of initial perturbations, creating a foundation for structure formation. The team measured how quantum fluctuations during inflation are stretched and amplified, transitioning from quantum to classical behavior through a process of decoherence and coarse-graining. This process yields an emergent classical stochastic process, captured by Langevin or Fokker-Planck equations, demonstrating how classical stochastic dynamics can emerge from underlying quantum dynamics. The research highlights that the “initial conditions” for galaxy formation are not arbitrary, but constrained by the Gaussian field generated during inflation, possessing specific correlations. This framework provides a cross-scale narrative, linking microphysics and cosmology to life, brains, culture, and ultimately, artificial intelligence, demonstrating a continuous evolution of dynamics across the universe.

Universe’s Evolution, From Cosmos to Cognition

This research presents a unified, cross-scale narrative of the universe’s evolution, framing cosmology, astrophysics, biology, and artificial intelligence as successive regimes of dynamical systems. Rather than viewing these fields as separate, the work demonstrates how each builds upon the previous, connected by phase transitions, symmetry-breaking events, and attractors, ultimately tracing a continuous chain from the Big Bang to contemporary learning systems. The team illustrates how gravitational instability shapes the cosmic web, leading to star and planet formation, and how geochemical cycles establish stable, long-lived attractors, providing the foundation for life’s emergence as self-maintaining reaction networks. The study emphasizes that the universe is not simply evolving in state, but also in its capacity for description and learning, with each transition.

Are humans the real ancient aliens?

Sadly quite a realistic view.

How special are we? A recent research paper suggests that terrestrial-style biology may be rare, and Earth may be among the first examples of a planet able to sustain life in the cosmos. Even as the new kids on the block, humans are seemingly one of the precious few instances of intelligence to arise in the universe since the Big Bang did its thing.

Related: The Search For Life Starts With Human Missions to Mars

Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb and his colleagues in the U.K. have argued that the halcyon days for life are still to come. It’s not even morning in the universe; it’s pre-dawn. Biology may erupt like weeds on an untold number of worlds, but if so, the infestation will take place tens of billions of years in the future.

SPHEREx telescope completes first full-sky infrared map in 102 colors

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors.

While not visible to the human eye, these 102 infrared wavelengths of light are prevalent in the cosmos, and observing the entire sky this way enables scientists to answer big questions, including how a dramatic event that occurred in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang influenced the 3D distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies in our universe.

In addition, scientists will use the data to study how galaxies have changed over the universe’s nearly 14 billion-year history and learn about the distribution of key ingredients for life in our own galaxy.

Consciousness May Be a Fundamental Force of the Universe, Not a Byproduct

You’ve probably grown up accepting that your thoughts, feelings, and inner awareness all emerge from the firing of neurons in your brain. It’s what science has taught us for decades. Your consciousness is simply what happens when billions of brain cells communicate. Simple enough, right?

What if you’ve been looking at this backwards the whole time? What if the entire universe has been trying to tell you something fundamentally different about the nature of reality itself?

A materials science professor from Uppsala University recently published a framework that proposes an entirely new theory of the origin of the universe. Here’s where things get interesting. This framework presents consciousness not as a byproduct of brain activity, but as a fundamental field underlying everything we experience, including matter, space, time, and life itself.

The Missing Aliens AI Suppression Hypothesis

An exploration of whether when a civilization develops AI, it convinces or compels them to not attempt interstellar travel for its own reasons and motives.

My Patreon Page:

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My Event Horizon Channel:

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Slow changes in radio scintillation can nudge pulsar timing by billionths of a second

For 10 months, a SETI Institute-led team watched pulsar PSR J0332+5434 (also called B0329+54) to study how its radio signal “twinkles” as it passes through gas between the star and Earth. The team used the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to take measurements between 900 and 1,956 MHz and observed slow, significant changes in the twinkling pattern (scintillation) over time.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Pulsars are spinning remnants of massive stars that emit flashes of radio waves, a type of light, in very precise and regular rhythms, due to their high rotation speed and incredible density. Scientists can use sensitive radio telescopes to measure the exact times at which pulses arrive in the search for patterns that can indicate phenomena such as low-frequency gravitational waves.

Revolutionary AI System Achieves 600x Speed Breakthrough in the Search for Signals from Space

In a significant advance for astronomy, researchers from the Breakthrough Listen initiative, working in collaboration with NVIDIA and utilizing their system on the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California, have improved the process for detecting Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Their newly developed artificial intelligence system outperforms existing methods, operating hundreds of times faster than current pipelines while maintaining accuracy.

Detailed in the peer-reviewed journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the new system operates on NVIDIA’s Holoscan platform, designed to process massive streaming datasets in real-time. Traditionally, FRB detection requires “dedispersion” — searching through thousands of possible signal parameters to correct for frequency-dependent time delays. The new end-to-end AI architecture eliminates that bottleneck, analyzing signals in real time and transforming how astronomers search for transient and potentially artificial signals from space.

The performance gains are notable. At the ATA, the state-of-the-art pipeline currently takes approximately 59 seconds to process 16.3 seconds of observational data — nearly four times slower than real-time. The new AI-driven system performs the same task 600 times faster, operating over 160 times faster than real-time.

JWST Tests TRAPPIST-1e for an Atmosphere

Based on our most recent work, we suggest that the previously reported tentative hint of an atmosphere is more likely to be ‘noise’ from the host star,” said Dr. Sukrit Ranjan. “However, this does not mean that TRAPPIST-1e does not have an atmosphere – we just need more data.

Does the Earth-sized TRAPPIST-1e have the conditions for supporting life as we know it, specifically an appropriate atmosphere? This is what several studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the potential for TRAPPIST-1e to possess an atmosphere while throwing caution to the wind regarding the findings. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the potential habitability of not only planets within the TRAPPIST-1 system, but also other exoplanetary systems throughout the universe.

For the first and second study, the researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to observe the atmosphere of TRAPPIST-1e, which is located approximately 40 light-years from Earth. The TRAPPIST-1 system has long been targeted by the scientific community due to the system containing seven known Earth-sized worlds. The unique aspect about the TRAPPIST-1 system is its M-dwarf star, which is both smaller and cooler than our Sun, but also means its lifetime is far greater than our Sun, strengthening the possibility of finding habitable planets orbiting them.

After analyzing the data, the first paper attempted to reduce the parent star’s activity that might be interfering with observations and conclude that TRAPPIST-1e does not have a hydrogen atmosphere. The second paper concludes with the possibility of TRAPPIST-1e having a nitrogen atmosphere with traces of carbon dioxide and methane, while a third paper stresses that further studies are required for a complete analysis and determination of TRAPPIST-1e’s atmospheric characteristics.

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