Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT

This podcast features a conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Adam Brown, a theoretical physicist and AI researcher at Google DeepMind. The discussion spans cosmology, the potential for manipulating the cosmological constant, the capabilities of AI, and the implications of both for the future of humanity. Brown discusses the possibility of future civilizations engineering vacuum decay events to alter the cosmological constant, potentially averting a heat death of the universe, though he emphasizes the significant risks involved. The conversation concludes with reflections on the limitations of current physics and the potential for AI to revolutionize scientific discovery. A key takeaway is the surprising idea that the amount of information a region of space can hold is proportional to its surface area, not its volume, a concept central to the holographic principle.