Definitely, although I’m more fascinated about white holes and the lack of interest in understanding them. I think they are key to understanding what the Big Bang “is” and how it happened, including at t=0. But besides that, anything that can help us getting a grip on quantum gravity is welcomed and truth be told, the AdS/CFT correspondence is the coolest thing I know about in physics.

The James Webb Space Telescope, I really wonder what it will pick up.

The truth is we will never know what the actual ontology of the universe is, be it mathematics itself or something else. There’s no way to do it, there’s nothing to compare that ontology (whatever it is) to. I think it’s not in principle answerable. However, I do find Max’s idea of math being equivalent to reality pretty enticing. To me, math doesn’t need a creator, it’s self sufficient and eternal. Maybe ontology is the same, whether you call it “ontology”, “God”, “Nature”, it doesn’t matter – maybe it has this property similar to math of not needing a creator and being the source of space and time, therefore not existing in time and not being bound by time and therefore not needing to answer the question “what caused your existence”.

The answer is both yes and no. Any point in the universe can claim to be the “center” of its observational bubble (of its observable universe), but neither point is actually “the center of the universe” as a whole, just like no point on the surface of the Earth is “the center of the surface of the Earth”. The reason is that the Big Bang is not a point in space but a moment in time.

Always a pleasure to listen to Max Tegmark.

I think both space and time are emergent from something “more fundamental” like quantum entanglement. I think Stephen Wolfram is onto something with his computational ideas. The fact that spacial dimensions themselves can change in number and maintain the same underlying structure and the Maldacena duality point to the fact that space is not fundamental. Time probably isn’t, either – maybe what we understand as time is just a superposition of all the possible configurations of the universe, something that Don Page proposed back in 1983 if I’m not mistaken.

That’s a difficult question – maybe we could look at the interplay between different proteins or meshes of proteins (tissues) together? Maybe doing this could help us understand cancerous tumors, for example, and devise treatment plans based on their “sound”?