AMA | November 2026

AMA questions November 2026

Peter
If you could have a super power, what would it be? Flight, super strength, super speed, teleportation, telekenesis (could be a fun party trick!) etc.

James McBeath
In the September 2026 AMA, you said:
The eternal Schwarzschild solution has all sorts of weird properties. It has not only a black hole, but it has a white hole in the past out of which things can come but nothing can go in. ... But the Einstein-Rosen bridge and the white hole are not thought to really exist in the world, but we study them because there's a simple mathematical setup to look at first.
In other podcasts you have said that scientists should have the courage to accept what the math is telling them. How do you decide when to accept the math and when to assume the predictions don't really exist?

Friedrich
As a European (German/Swedish) I regularly have to watch with horror how the American election systems create really poor outcomes for everyone involved. But from a physics of democracy perspective, aren't you stuck somehow? The politicians who could change anything are the ones who are heavily dependent on its existence. And psychologically, most voters can probably not fathom any alternative without having lived abroad for some time. Do you see a path that could work to move to enable better outcomes without destabilizing society on a catastrophic level?

lucas pollard
Have you ever significantly changed your mind about a scientific or philosophical question without encountering new evidence, simply because you came to understand the existing arguments differently?

Roo Phillips
I loved the recent episode with Greg Caruso. I know you're not a fan of free will discussions, but keep them coming! I'm curious how you would compare and contrast your compatibilist views with Greg's free will skeptic views, specifically on what changes to the US legal system should theoretically be pursued. I'm having a hard time understanding the differences between compatibilists and skeptics like Greg, and I'm hoping that when applied to a specific case like how we might modify the justice system might make it a little more clear.

Jeffrey Segall
I was wondering whether you think it is just as well that there does not seem to be the possibility of faster than light travel or communication. As I think von Neumann pointed out, since our species has evolved rather late in the development of the universe, if faster than light travel were possible, it is likely that a species that developed earlier might have already spread throughout the galaxy, including earth, and blocked the evolution of humans. Similarly, with faster than light communication, a more advanced civilization might be able to hack our technology (along the lines of the three body problem novels) and doom humanity. Given those possible dangers, do you nevertheless hope that faster than light travel/communication may be possible or do you breathe a sigh of relief that it is not?

half-a-crackpot
My question for you is as an author. Let’s say, hypothetically speaking mind you, that I own copies of a few of your books. I get to see them sitting on my shelf in all their glory every time I walk into my home office. Then one day I happened to find PDFs of those same books that fell off the back of a truck. I tried my best to chase them down to return them, but alas, I didn’t even manage to get their plate. Would you personally be offended, or feel wronged, if I used those digital copies that were not paid for?

Perry Whan
I am having trouble thinking through the differences between an infinite universe (repeating?) and a continuous universe that just bubbles off from itself. Is there an intuitive way to think about these distinctions?

Kevin’s Disobedience
You don’t strike me as someone who is inspired by any one particular philosopher, but if you were going to teach a course on one person’s philosophy who would it be?

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Alex West
There seems to be split opinion on OpenAI withholding their Yang-Mills existence proof from public view. Thoughts?

Alexander Knochel
I would love to hear your opinion about the latest Yang-Mills claims by OpenAI. I'm personally very unhappy how the results are communicated, but am of course very interested in learning more about rigorous definitions of Yang Mills and the Standard Model.
p.s. how do you view the significance of the actual result, irresepective of how it was communicated

Tyler Whitmer
i have a sort of meta-question about the yang-mills openai announcement. i was struck by the different ways the various constituencies engaged by openai in the math and physics worlds asked for the discoveries to be handled by openai. do you have any thoughts on how you’d prefer these things to be dealt with in the future, especially if they directly affected an area where you’re a published expert?
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Caleb Yaryan
My son is a Jr. In highschool and has expressed interest in pursuing a career in physics, I have an engineering background and have practical advice for him if he wanted to pursue engineering but I am curious what advice you have for a highschool student that is considering physics?

Philip Obbard
Do you think there may be something in Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence if the block universe is to be taken literally? After all, if the entire history of the universe is “out there”, there should be nothing to stop you experiencing your life anew after you die (?).

Joshua Hillerup
Would anthropic reasoning mean we should favor with Fermi paradox explanations one that maximize the number of intelligent species out there who are capable of wondering about the Fermi paradox?

KalessinTheFirst
If big wormholes a-la Star Trek were real, what would be the safest way to enter them? In media, wormholes act like objects on a 2d plane and spacetime bends inward perpendicular to that plane. The spaceship then enters from a direction perpendicular to the plane, right into the middle of the curvature. But in real life, they would be spherical and spaceships could not enter at an angle perpendicular to the plane. So could one enter from any direction? It's science fiction so maybe anything goes.

Tom B. Night
PRIORITY QUESTION: Apologies in advance because I know you don't like questions about free will. It seems like many people in this debate, for example your recent guest Gregg Caruso, try to eat their cake and have it too. They acknowledge someone's lack of free will when they make a bad decision, like committing a crime, then assume others have free will when deciding how to feel or respond. It seems the practical, logically consistent position is to treat everyone as if they have something resembling libertarian free will. What do you think?

David Commander
How does a Boltzmann brain continue to survive and if it can't why isn't ongoing experiences in the moments of now insufficient to prove I am not one? In other words, if I can have false past memories can I also have false ongoing experiences or the illusion thereof?

Chris Kaltwasser
I have an unpopular theory, and that is that the three-point shot should be removed from the NBA. It rewards a less exciting game. Who cares how good somebody is at shooting a long shot? I would rather see really cool plays that involve strategy, great passing, getting inside, and that kind of thing.
I have yet to do the research, but I don't think the three-point shot actually pays off as often as people think. I feel like players miss them more often than they make them, giving up possession without making a shot that might have taken more strategy but had better odds.
What are your thoughts on this topic?

Nikola ivanov
If cosmic birefringence is conclusively detected, how could we distinguish observationally between a fundamental violation of Lorentz invariance, as explored in your early work, and birefringence caused by an evolving field in a Lorentz-invariant universe?

Rich Hogg
As one with a strong naturalistic bent,I would tend to think someone else's supernatural experience was a hallucination or other misfiring of his brain. But I want to keep an open mind while not forgetting that it could happen to me. If I see a ghost tonight, how do I as a "maybe-crazy Bayesian" decide whether I should update my priors, or make an appointment with a neurologist?

Michael Bright
Since learning even just a little bit about Einstein's explanation of gravity I've always been bothered by the cartoon image of a ball on a trampoline. It makes it look like space has a "down". If you agree with my frustration, is there a more preferable cartoonish image or set of images in your mind to visualize what spacetime curvature actually is?

Zach McKinney
The prevailing cultural narrative around AI is one of inevitability and runaway proliferation. However, this chain of reasoning never seems to reckon with the planetary boundaries of finite material resources and energy.
On what time scale (if any) do you foresee the proliferation and diffusion of AI to become constrained by such limits?

Michael Aster
Since you've talked about how you like the game, how would you feel if Kingdom Rush reached out for a sponsorship on the podcast?

David Sotolongo
In the April 2023 AMA, you said: "I think we need to build a lot more housing. I think it is very, very obvious, that's the best way to make housing more affordable, build more of it."
I agree, and am curious how you think we should go about building more housing? Should the government step in to build, and maybe manage, such housing? And what, if anything, would you do about existing homeowners who oppose new housing because it would decrease the value of their property?

Allan Lubel
Your intelligence and generosity of spirit has really made an impact on me, asking if you feel you received these qualities from your parents or any other influences when growing up and if you could give a couple of examples.

Miron Mizrahi
In the last AMA, when you discussed neutrino oscillations, you said something that sounded a lot like an uncertainty principle: there is no state when the neutrino has both definitive mass AND definitive flavour. I get how this can work for a single particle or field. But how does it work for three? or is there one field for all neutrinos and the mass/falvor combinations are just different values of the field?

Dylan Samuel
I'm a teaching assistant for a mechanical engineering class and I'm pretty sure that a very large percentage of the class is using AI to do their homework, as their test scores tend to be vastly worse than their homework scores. Recently, a UC Berkeley professor made news saying that they no longer see the point in grading their students' homework. Apologies if you've answered something similar before, but what are your thoughts on this, and generally how are you adapting to teach with students knowing they'll likely use AI? It seems counterproductive to pay for college and then not learn anything!

Tucker Hiatt
Am I mistaken to interpret Newton’s Second Law to include the notion that forces CAUSE accelerations, and to want something similarly causal in a QFT worldview? Please don’t make me give up on causality!

Matt Patterson
I’m an avid Mindscape follower and was intrigued by your discussion with Jenann Ismael and her philosophical argument about why it’s OK to kill cows but not humans based on their Value. Value, in this case, being measured by one’s memory of one’s life, having plans for one’s future as well as these same items in others that one has influenced. For cows, this kind of Value is essentially zero and for humans it is much greater. It occurred to me that the Value of individual humans can vary over a wide range (and might even be negative - e.g., in the case of a serial killer). Given that thoughtful humans do decide to kill other humans it seems that considering the Value of those that would die might be one of the considerations in evaluating the moral rightness or wrongness of making such a decision. My question is: Do you think that the Value of potential “death victims” should be one of the considerations when assessing the morality of decisions to kill them? Or is there some moral, or other, objection to this idea?

Karoly Kantor
How likely do you think it is that the observable universe is such a minuscule part of the total universe that our observations are just local phenomena and say little of use about the whole?

Calvin Firth
In mad-dog Everettian QM, where there is a single wavefunction of the universe that evolves with time according to some Hamiltonian, what exactly is that Hamiltonian, or where does it come from? In what I have learned so far, as a beginning physics grad student, the Hamiltonian comes from some potential, which is usually classical-looking (ie Hydrogen atom) or at the very least is a function of space (ie inf. square well, SHO, etc.). However, in the mad-dog Everettian picture, I take it that space is emergent. So where does the Hamiltonian come from? Where does it "live"?

Felivel Camilo
Do you believe technologies such as LLMs or realistic image generation arrived at an inappropriate moment? Might humanity have benefited more from developing them only after achieving some form of enlightenment?

Redlynx
What is your opinion about AI successionism, the idea that if machines will become conscious it would be ethically right to let them replace humanity?

Edwin Miles
I have been wondering recently about ‘value’ and wanted to ask the following:
Is the value of something only and always contingent on there being someone or something to value it? Or is there some intrinsic ‘value’ to something separate to any human bias, preference and valuation etc.

scott
Do Feynman diagrams have ontic content or are they purely computational? I understand that all we measure are scattering amplitudes, not full histories of particle interactions that Feynman diagrams might visually imply. But it seems that among working physicists, these diagrams are essential vocabulary for discussing and visualizing processes. It makes me think there is more to them.

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David Khudaverdyan
could you please talk about pointer states? Which aspects of them are already explained and understood by the physics community, and which aspects still await an explanation? You once mentioned that finding the classical world is still an open question in the many-worlds interpretation.

Henry Jacobs
On the question of “why do we never observe a superposition”. Is it plausible that observing always involves large systems becoming entangled with the small quantum spin or whatever, and we don’t consider the system “observed” until it has evolved into one of the eigenstates. This seems circular but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing
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Daniel Zaccariello
Baseball has no clock; outs are its time. And its rulebook forces an exact conservation law: every batter ends the inning as an out, a run, or a man left on base. Physics derives its conservation laws from the form of its rules too, except it had to guess the rules. Is that the only difference?

Anonymous
If you were starting over today, what assumption in our current formulations of quantum theory would you be most inclined to question—not because it is demonstrably wrong, but because removing it might open a genuinely new direction?

Daniel Shulman
It seems to be accepted dogma that singularities exist inside black holes and some time just before the Big Bang. If we treat spacetime as having some torsion, instead of zero torsion, we get Einstein-Cartan gravity, which looks exactly like GR except at the small scales where singularities matter, and the repulsive forces from the torsion in Einstein-Cartan gravity eliminates singularities. Is it just a historical accident that Einstein didn’t know enough geometry to introduce torsion that we still believe in singularities, or is there a reason why physicists don’t give more credence to Einstein-Cartan gravity?

Mat Becker
Do you enjoy gardening or have any other outdoor hobbies?

Jeroen
Do you think there are interesting dynamics in quantum field theory that are under explored because they don't map well to particles?

MrG
It was recently reported by Sludge that former podcast guest Cornel West's 2024 presidential campaign was indirectly funded by Elon Musk through the "Interstate Priorities" election fund. While its not clear that West knew of this involvement, its difficult to reconcile the purportedly pro-democracy rhetoric of someone like West with the practical effects of his, and similar ostensibly pro-democracy political actors, actions working against American democracy.
How should liberals act towards those who claim to support democracy but actively work against it?

Rob Butler
If a potential solution to the fine tuning problem is a multiverse, and if they all expand like ours, what prevents the universes from expanding into each other? If they had different laws of physics would they interact, or rather pass by like ships in the night?

David Maxwell
Like you, I've always believed in letting ideas flow and trusting people to sort through the truth. Recent years have made me question that is media landscapes have enabled systems where large percentages of the population only see total fabrication and never see the true ideas. Have your views on censorship changed?

josh
You’ve mentioned playing poker a few times, so I’ve gotta ask…assuming it’s Texas Hold’em, what’s your favorite starting hand? Are you a big pocket pair kind of guy, or do you get more excited seeing suited connectors?

Alen
In the previous AMA you characterized disagreements about free will as largely semantic, despite arguing just minutes earlier in the same episode that emergent phenomena are genuinely real. You also seemed to endorse the view that free will emerges from agency in the recent Christian List episode. Can you reconcile the apparent contradiction or clarify whether I’m missing something here?

Paul Torek
How important is it for Everettians to *derive* the Born rule? Obviously, it would be *nice* to reduce your theory's number of assumptions by 1. But don't most other "interpretations" of QM help themselves to an empirically-validated Born rule, rather than deriving it?

Gustavo Chaves
In the March/2026 AMA, while answering a question about your take on the notion of "computational functionalism", you said that you "think that the underlying processes that lead you from the input to the output are crucially important in whether or not those processes involve something that we can call consciousness."
In his recent essay, The Mythology Of Conscious AI (https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/), Anil Seth challenged the notion of "computational functionalism" arguing, among other things, that there are functions that Turing Machines cannot compute perfectly, such as continuous or stochastic functions. As I understand it, he argues that perhaps consciousness depends on processes that a Turing Machine cannot compute, but only simulates in a way that isn't precise enough to allow for consciousness to emerge.
Is this more or less what you're thinking about when you mentioned the importance of the "underlying processes" happening in our brains or was it something different?

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Krisztian Dobo
Do you think AI will be able to produce new theories in physics just by the sheer fact that it has access to a vast amount of papers, findings and theories and is able to hold them in its head and freely recombine them? I understand your point about physics, that given its experimental nature (with regards to proving things, anyway) it's less susceptible to AI breakthroughs, but i have a feeling there might be low hanging (yet important) fruits hanging around that are not discovered because of the immense specialization and amount of knowledge in science.

James Alan
What do you predict would happen if you constructed a training data set for an AI that only contained data from quantum mechanics experiments. Could you build up an agent who’s intuition about the world were quantum mechanical instead of classical? do you predict being able to extract novel insights from such an agent?
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Jonathan Kleiman
PRIORITY QUESTION:
Sean, how do you distinguish genuine academic consensus from people being afraid to disagree? Has that fear contributed to public distrust of universities, and what should they do differently?

P Walder
How do you think AI will inform Theoretical Physics in the short term - 3-12 months?

C Jurlando
In your April AMA, you discussed Habermas’s concern that economic and administrative systems can colonize the lifeworld, displacing communication and shared meaning. A successor in that critical tradition, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, has developed a related critique through his concept of “resonance”: relationships with people, work, nature, or art in which we feel addressed, can respond, and are changed by the encounter. In such moments, the world seems to come alive and "crackle," drawing us into encounters we cannot fully control. Rosa proposes resonance as a criterion for a good life beyond wealth or the mere satisfaction of preferences. I find this compelling: a society could become ever richer and more efficient while making resonant relationships increasingly difficult to sustain - and that is bad! Do you think resonance could provide an objective standard for judging a society’s success, or at least a standard that goes beyond subjective preferences? What would justify treating it as such?

Robert Ruxandrescu
Have you thought about adding some perks for the higher paying members of Mindscape? For example, you could hold a trimestrial or yearly two hours Zoom meeting with the higher tier paying members and have a live chat with them, like a live AMA where you could have short back and forth conversations. What do you think?

the_priority_question
How much of an impact do you think that social media and their algorithms promoting echo chamber bubbles has on the current political polarisation, and is this a bad thing?

Peter Huncar
I really enjoyed your episode with Gregg Caruso. It got me thinking about the “who” behind the choosing, so here’s a two-sided question:
Who is Sean, and when is Sean?
Narrator, brain, or body, and over what timescale?
Over seconds you look autonomous, but over decades your zip code does a lot of the choosing.
Where do you draw the boundary of the self that chooses? Is that a fact or a modeling choice, and at what point does “Sean did it” become just “the universe evolved”?

Sid Huff
There has been considerable discussion in the news media recently about the concept of designing a “kill switch” that would shut down an AI system if it were determined to have “gone rogue.” From your understanding of current and future AI, would a kill switch be an effective solution to potential AI malfunction?

Michael Helgerson
With the NBA season in full swing and your work on the Physics of Democracy underway, what would your outline for The Physics of Basketball book look like?

Owe
I was a little surprised in your reflection after talking with Chandra Sripada at how strongly you seemed to take his perspective. One thing I found mostly missing in the conversation was what's built in to language. My question is: do you think that Sripada was correct in ascribing so much intent to the models (for example, he mentions "the model is doing something like implicit Bayesian inference", or instead is something like Bayesian inference being built in to the weights between words because humans use Bayes in constructing the sentences that LLMs are trained on?

Brandon Lewis
I'm still trying to understand how to think about particles in QFT. I get that the fields permeate all of space. The fields are constantly oscillating within their degrees of freedom, but also coupled to each other, so the oscillation can move between fields. When that happens, we observe particles decaying or fusing. We can only observe discrete measurement outcomes of a continuous wave function, the infinite other possibilities lost to us once our universe has made its choice. Are particles in QFT just when the wave function has sufficient energy or density at some location?

Joie
As often heard on Mindscape, the early universe is described as very low entropy that increases with time, which is also how/why we experience time linearly. As a total physics novice who only knows about it from this podcast and other lay sources, my question is, can entropy be zero at time zero? If so, what would that look like and mean?

Marie Rausku
With the upcoming Halloween and people talking about ghosts, haunting and paranormal stuff I have realised that so many people have easy to believe in ghosts, demonic possession or afterlife. But then the Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics is called or counterintuitive or "bonkers" and "much harder to believe in" (than ghosts)- not just by people believe in ghosts but by other scientists too. Why is that, what do you think?

Rob Gebele
You consider Boltzmann brains a serious problem for cosmology because they may vastly outnumber ordinary observers. Yet in Everettian quantum mechanics, observers on branches with arbitrarily small amplitudes are also real, and you appeal to Born-rule weights rather than simply counting them. If Boltzmann brains themselves arise from rare quantum fluctuations, why can’t we resolve the BB problem by applying an appropriate quantum measure that suppresses their contribution? What makes the quantum measure principled but an analogous cosmological measure illegitimate?

Daniel Bagley
A recent article in Aeon states, “If panpsychism doesn’t resonate with you, it’s worth asking if there truly is a reason for everything – if the world is ultimately intelligible after all.” Do you think a belief in consciousness as an emergent thing invites the view that there is no reason for the universe to exist? I take it that “reason” is a function of consciousness, and panpsychists believe that the reason the universe exists is that consciousness exists, but I’m not sure if it’s correct to think that a person who doesn’t believe consciousness is fundamental would also believe there is no reason for a universe that produced conscious beings to exist.

Mindscape
Do you have a description or definition of how or what you define as consciousness? I'm enjoying reading the many ways consciousness is currently described by others in various fields. I'd enjoy hearing your thinking on the subject. Do you align with a particular definition?

Jonathan Good
Could 2 branches on the path from a low-entropy past contain different conscious experiences but still become 1 branch in the future if the differences were never recorded in a way that became entangled with current observers' degrees of freedom in a way that produces lasting decoherent differences?

Dan Butler
PRIORITY QUESTION:
Can you talk a bit about Lorenz invariance in emergent spacetime? Is it a challenge to come up with quantum theories where Lorenz invariance emerges rather than is just assumed? Is it a helpful constraint on theories of emergent spacetime, or not really?

Moshe Feder
In the late 90s, Randall and Sundrum proposed two variations of a five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space model to solve the hierarchy problem of gravity’s weakness relative to the other forces.
What did you think of their proposals at the time and has any further work been done on them since?

Nate D
I’m a bit confused about the relevance of the various “interpretations” of quantum mechanics for experimental physics. Are the formalisms underneath all of the interpretations so consistent as to make one’s theoretical preference as an experimentalist—let’s say, for Many Worlds over Pilot Wave—irrelevant? Or would “believing” in Many Worlds over Pilot Wave potentially generate different experimental arrangements? Basically, this is just a question about the relationship between theory and practice in contemporary quantum mechanics.

Sonja
What are your thoughts on the recent elections in Serbia and the key role played by university students and members of the academic community?

Benjamin Zand
In general relativity spacetime has a definite curvature at every point, described by the Riemann tensor. If we measured a traveler’s speed relative to this curved geometry, with each point having its own curvature, wouldn’t that give us an absolute standard of motion? Or do the components of the curvature tensor change with the observer’s velocity in a way that keeps the principle of relativity intact? If the latter, where/how does observers velocity enter into the equations?

Jake
PRIORITY QUESTION: In a previous AMA, you argued that the morality of painlessly killing hypothetical kittens depends on the reason, and that killing them purely for enjoyment would be morally wrong.
Would you also consider it morally wrong to kill an animal for a tastier meal when a nutritionally equivalent plant-based alternative is available, since in both cases the reason for killing is enjoyment? I understand why taking pleasure in killing might be morally objectionable, but does the seemingly innocent pleasure of eating justify the killing itself?

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People at AI labs appear to be freaking out that AI research looks like Go or theorem proving. AIs suck at most things, but in the narrow domains where AIs can get fast and objectively true signal on their performance (they won/lost the Go game, their hacking exploit worked/failed, their LEAN proof was valid/invalid), AIs can run an ungodly number of trials and teach themselves to outclass humans through brute force. The bottlenecks of AI research seem to have fast and objectively true signal (“prediction loss went up/down”), and the labs are now spending billions per quarter trying to train AIs to do AI research. Should we be freaked out?

Dennis Briggs
I tell my students the linear systems don’t know when enough is enough. Is Many Worlds the ultimate example of that aphorism, or am I missing something?

George Hampton
Given the state of our democracy, I've been thinking about Gödel's Loophole and am wondering if this is the 'inner inconsistency' he was thinking about. Do you have any thoughts on this?