Juan Maldacena has been described as the first great theoretician of the twenty-first century. In a series of brilliantly imaginative insights, he has enriched our understanding of gravity, space-time and black holes. During this relaxed and informative interview with Graham, recorded last summer in Princeton, Maldacena describes how he became interested in modern physics, his astonishing discovery of an equivalence between a string theory and a quantum field theory. He also gives his views about the current state of our understanding of the universe and prospects for the future of theoretical physics. Read more in Graham Farmelo's book The Universe Speaks in Numbers. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy