Solver Thomas Mack explained that the reason you didn't need to
read a single word of it was that the author had encoded a binary
message in the thesis by flipping the watermark on certain pages.
Therefore, even though Vacuum-bounded
states and the entropy of black-hole evaporation, by Ken D.
Olum. is available online, it won't help you.
The final answer given in the metapuzzle solution is ION. If we
assume the arithmetic in the puzzle was manipulating the
alphabetical indices of the letters, this doesn't allow any common
word to be the 5-letter word extracted from the thesis.