Ashmeet Singh on a Quantum-First Approach to Space, Time, Gravity, and Cosmology

In the 1920s, physicists like Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Planck—and many others—realized something deeply unsettling and beautiful: the universe at microscopic scales is nothing like what we observe in everyday life. This was the era when quantum mechanics was discovered. And I’m intentionally saying discovered, not born, because that word choice matters. Quantum mechanics isn’t just a framework we invented—it’s closer to the idea that we uncovered something that was already true about reality.What makes this discovery so fascinating is that quantum mechanics feels so far away from how we perceive the world… and yet, it is literally what the world is. The universe is fundamentally governed by quantum laws. And what we experience in daily life—objects with definite properties, predictable motion, a world that feels stable and classical—can be thought of as an emergent phenomenon.And the way we’re taught physics reflects that. When we start learning physics in high school, we begin with the rules of the world we directly experience: classical physics. Only later do we “upgrade” to quantum mechanics, and we try to map our classical intuition onto this quantum world. And we do that for a very human reason: from birth, we’ve trained our intuition on the classical world. So when quantum mechanics tells us something that doesn’t match that intuition, it feels non-intuitive.But what if we flipped the script?If the universe is fundamentally quantum, why don’t we start there? Why don’t we build our intuition from the quantum picture first—and then understand classical reality as something that emerges in the right circumstances? That question—this idea of taking a quantum-first approach—is exactly what our guest today, Ashmeet Singh, is thinking about.Ashmeet is a theoretical physicist who completed his PhD at Caltech and is now a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Along with being a brilliant physicist, Ashmeet is also an avid science communicator—someone who has a real gift for explaining complex ideas in physics in a way that’s clear, intuitive, and genuinely exciting.In this episode, we also talk to Ashmeet about his personal journey through academia: how he navigated his path from IIT to Caltech to IIT, what that transition felt like, and what he learned along the way about doing research, and finding a place in physics.We’re genuinely grateful to IIT Delhi for hosting us—both giving us this beautiful space to sit in and record and for inviting us to give colloquium talks while we were in India. And a special thanks to Saarthak Parik for being a wonderful host and organizing everything so smoothly.So if you’ve ever wondered what it would mean to understand the universe starting from quantum mechanics—treating classical reality not as the default, but as the thing that has to be explained—then you are in for a treat. Ashmeet's Website: https://www.quantumfirst.space/Ashmeet's Youtube (The Scribbled Equation): https://www.youtube.com/@TheScribbledEquation