Savan Chhaniyara

Here's my conversation with Don Lincoln about some of the biggest open questions in physics, including dark energy, dark matter, the matter-antimatter imbalance, quantum vacuum, quantum foam, and the quest to unify the laws of physics. Don is a particle physicist at Fermilab who has spent decades working at the frontiers of high energy physics. He is also a great teacher & writer. I highly recommend his courses & books. One of my favorite lecture series he has given is The Evidence for Modern Physics where he breaks down the experiments that validate some of the weird laws of physics we have, and what it would take to validate even the weirder ones. It's not enough to come up with a beautiful theory. You also have to show through experiment that the theory is likely to be correct. This process often doesn't get the love it deserves, even though it's often the most important and difficult part of the scientific process. I ❤️ physics. The conversation is here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:49 - Unifying the laws of nature 15:20 - General relativity 32:27 - Electroweak force 44:09 - How particle colliders work 1:02:12 - Higgs boson discovery 1:12:32 - Theory of everything 1:42:17 - Physics of empty space 1:49:41 - Antimatter 2:10:31 - Dark energy 2:14:20 - Dark matter 2:42:56 - Future of physics

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids. An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better. This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.