Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIf you repeat the same experiment, do you get the same outcome?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield Savings account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
And friends and families walking riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to.
Get home safely.
Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too, Go safely. California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
There's a core idea in science that experiments should be repeatable.
If you do an experiment the same way different times, you should get the same result.
However, there is a loophole.
There's a loophole in science.
Yeah, and that loophole opens a window into everything we think is true about reality, in the universe and everything.
Do welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
In which we try to take the entire universe and break it into bite sized pieces so you can enjoy them with your afternoon coffee.
Amore. I'm a cartoonist, I draw comics online.
And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I spend my days smashing protons together at the large Hadron colliders to try to reveal the secrets of the universe, mostly so that I can tell them to you in this podcast.
Basically, only one of us is qualified to be explaining things to you on this podcast.
That would be the cartoonist. Yeah, Physicists are not qualified usually to be explainers. Mostly we just try to solve the mysteries of the universe. We don't try to tell anybody about them.
Right, Mostly physicists just need explaining.
That's right. That's where the cartoons come in.
Right, Yeah, and spouses also, spouses of physicists probably have to do a lot of explaining.
You've got some explaining to do, exactly. Yeah. So we're here to talk to you about big questions about the universe. And today's question is a really deep in basic question, and it's about the very nature of reality. What is it? Hoge, What are we going to talk about today?
Is the universe random or is it just chaotic? And what's the difference?
Or is it run by some super being? And we're actually just in their simulation. But that's a whole other.
Episode, that's a whole other podcast.
Right today, just the two sinister options, random or chaotic, You might feel like, ooh, neither of those sound very cozy. I don't want to live in either of those universes.
Well, the question basically breaks down to is the universe predictable? Like can you predict what the universe is going to do? Or is it that nobody can predict what the universe is going to do.
Right, And I think that's why it's an awesome question for science because for so many thousands and thousands of years, I think humans probably felt like the universe around them was totally unpredictable. I mean, they invented gods for this and for that to try to describe how the universe was out of their control and doing things that didn't make sense if had some you know, will and agency, right, Yeah, And then science comes along it says, actually, there are rules and you can discover them. And slowly science starts to creep in this description in the universe that locks out this agency, this idea, this personality, and gives you the sense that maybe the universe follows these rules. Right.
So we went out and as usual'll ask people on the street do you think the universe is random or chaotic?
And here's what they had to.
Say, that's gonna okay, that's a that's a thinker there. Uh, I would say, surely random. With randomness comes chaos. You never know what will happen, but there's there's always a probability and a chance of things, of certain things happening.
I'd like to say random.
I'm religious, so I feel like everything happens for a reason, and yes it is random, but there's a purpose behind everything.
I think it's a mixture of both. Like it's random, but it can appear chaotic because of.
How everything is truly chaotic, because like on a smaller level, everything is like moving really fast, but at like a bigger level, we don't see any of that.
Wow, So would you think of those answers or hey, I.
Think they were all over the place. They were actually kind of random.
Yeah, they were random and chaotic. I feel like I feel like people had no idea what I was asking them.
You know, I feel like people just I feel like they had no idea what they were answering.
Some of those people. I remember recording these interviews, and some of those people, as the words were coming out of their mouth, I felt like they surprised them as much as they did me. Like it was all over the place.
Yeah, well, I feel like some people it's interesting. Some people related to the question that question to the other question, which is like does the universe have a purpose, Like do things happen for a reason or do they is it just like a random role to die and nobody's really in charge. Like that's the question, right, Like, is somebody in charge of the universe or is it impossible for anyone to kind of predict what it's going to do?
Yeah? I think you're right. That does get at the heart of the question. You know, what's going to happen in the universe and can we tell and can we influence it? Right? Is the universe sort of churning on without our ability to change this direction at all in some sort of way that's been determined since the dawn of time? Or can we nudge it and push it in one way or the other, you know, make the calves win? Or can you if you jump up and down in front of your television enough where the Warriors win another NBA championship? You know, can you influence the world? I think that's an interesting and deep question. Yeah, that's probably the one people were actually having in their mind.
Yeah, so maye let's go back in history, and I like how you think about this question a lot, Daniel, which is that you sort of start with early man, like the cave men and women and women early humans were really just kind of at the mercy of all the elements and all the animals out there and the weather, and so they to them the universe was this crazy, random and chaotic place.
Right yeah. And it actually it touches on sort of my personal theory of consciousness, which is that we developed this awareness because we are looking out into the world for other people or other ideas. Are there intelligences and we have this hyperactive ability to see agency, to see intention in something that we don't understand, and we imagine that there must be a mind behind it. And so I think for a long time people's view of the world was that it was controlled by other greater minds. You know, what controls the lightning? Why do some people die of disease? All this stuff? And then as there.
Must be like a consciousness that is shooting out these lightning bolts or making it rain, or you know, making the sun come out.
Or killing my baby of some horrible disease, right, like, there must be. It's hard to live in this world if you don't have the sense that there's somebody else in charge.
Right.
There's a lot of suffering and a lot of pain, and a lot of unexplained events, and it's nice to think somebody else out there is taking care of it, or somebody's in charge of it. But there's a reason, right yeah, that there's a reason, that there's some design, it's not just random. But then as history progresses, as we were saying earlier, you know, science comes along. It says, well, there are seemed to be some rules, not just like that anything can happen. You can't have an ostrich here and then all of a sudden the ostrich is gone. There are some rules that limit what can happen. If you know what's happening now, there's a certain set of possibilities for what can happen in one second and two seconds.
And you know that's physics, right Well, it started with like noticing patterns, right Like lightning doesn't just come out of nowhere, it comes out when there's these dark clouds in the sky, right.
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And people started noticing patterns and started putting those together and then asking themselves, can I use what I've learned in the past to predict the future? Right Like, if I have the same set of events that happened yesterday, I am I going to be able to tell what's going to happen next week? If the same thing happens. You know, if I roll a ball down the hill yesterday and it goes up to a certain speed, will the same thing happen tomorrow?
Right?
Right? Or if I throw a ball in the air and I know which direction it's going and how fast it is going, can I dig where it's going to land exactly? If I build a catapult, can I basically aim it right?
Exactly? And that's how military technology drove science even hundreds of years ago. Right, Where do I shoot my cannon exactly to get over that wall?
Yeah? Well, that's kind of where Newton came in, right, Isaac Newton, And that's why they say he kind of gave birth to science, right, or at least the scientific Revolution.
No, I think it was earlier than that. Newton came along well after folks like Galileo and Francis Bacon and those guys. They really were the first ones to do experiments and to say, let's see what rules the universe is following, and let's see if we can try to deduce them and use those to predict the outcome of future experiments. They really were the first ones to connect the idea of a scientific universe to the actual experiments they do to influence those ideas and to predict future results. And I think that's the key is that here we've developed a system science which can not only explain what we've seen before, but can predict the future. Now you are about to fire a cannon ball at your to me, you want to know where is that ball going to fly? And it's incredible that physics can do that. It can literally predict the future if you know enough about the situation right right.
It's kind of like Google Maps. Now it can totally tell if you're going to be late to meeting or not, or to a podcast recording they're going to they're late, Like how long will it take to get home? They're like, oh, they're going to be late.
It's not always a hard problem though. Jege for example, it says if person equals whohe, then late equals true every time every time. Data predictable data, and some of these things are simple, but some of these things are complicated, and it's incredible to witness as physics sort of builds confidence and science develops our ability to predict you know, chemical reactions and biological function, all sorts of things, and then it gives this creeping sense of is there anything that can escape science? Right? Can science predict everything? Like, if you knew enough about the world, could you bring it all down to cannonballs to predict where all those cannonballs are going to fly and then tell exactly what's going to happen.
Yeah, And it's like kind of like if you know that force equals mass times acceleration, like Newton figured out, then you can predict things like cannonballs and catapults, and you could possibly predict like how a room full of particles move, right, Yeah, possibly you can extend that to can you predict how the whole world works? Yeah, what it's going to do and what people are going to do?
Extrapolate to the whole universe, right Yeah, I mean, and that's the principle of determinism. It says, look, if things follow rules, and the future is dependent only two things, one the rules and two the things that are happening now the current state. Right, given if you know exactly where things are, imagine the whole universe is just a bunch of tiny cannon balls, and you know the rules of those cannonballs, and you know the position and direction of motion of all those cannonballs. Then in principle, given a super powerful universe sized computer, you should be able to predict the future one to five ten seconds into the future, a thousand seconds into the future.
Like every single molecule, atom, subatomic particle. You should be able if it follows rules, you should be able to kind of track where it's going to go. Is you tell you based on where things are now, what's gonna happen?
Exactly.
It's kind of like this idea of a clock, right, is the universe giant clock just kind of clicking along or is there some kind of magic inside of it that makes it unpredictable?
Right exactly? And the idea of the universe just being a huge clock, is both exciting and terrifying. Right. It's exciting because like, wow, can you imagine we could understand the universe that well, that we could predict the future? Think about what we could do, Right, But it's terrifying because it's sort of like you're trapped in this science cage where you have no influence over the world and everything you do and know and say, and that joke you're gonna make in that fart you're gonna let slip are all predictable, right, All those things are predictable. That's scary. It makes you feel like you are part of that watch and you're just clicking a long because the you're reacting to things around you and your initial conditions, and so that's terrifying.
And I think we have kind of an innate sense of like rejecting this idea that we're trapped, right. We everyone wants to feel like they have free will, Like everyone wants to know that they have a choice, right, Well.
I guess so my kids don't feel that way, you know, like why didn't you hit your sister? Well she hit me, you know, like, well, so what do you have? No free will? Like you're completely determined by her behavior. I have that argument with my kids so many times. I'm always thinking about the philosophical echoes of that.
My kids are always rebelling. They're like, we want free will. Don't tell us what to do?
I see, but they want you to follow rules. They're like, you promised daddy we could have ice cream, right, and so therefore you have to there's no more decision to be made.
Kids are so unfair.
They're philosophically inconsistent. I think it's really the problem with kids.
Yeah they're cute, but.
If they just read some more Nietzsche, you know, and some some Carl and some Popper or whatever, they would be easier to be around.
Yeah, forget those picture books. Let's introduce it.
Let's predict the universe. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month. Go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless build to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash Universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has fourty eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight y eight and Data Brooks Mosaic, take a free test drive of Oci at Oracle dot com slash Strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic. Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's that credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high yield savings account through Applecard, apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. I think there's something fascinating about the deterministic view of the universe, but probably people out there thinking, Okay, maybe in theory you could predict the whole universe, but in practice impossible. I mean, you don't have a universe sized computer to break the whole universe, and even to predict like you know, a person is a huge number of articles and so to do that calculation just seems impractical, right.
Right, it's practically possible, but I think people revel just to the idea of it, right, Like, are my thoughts my thoughts or just something that I'm programmed and that I will inevitably have and do?
Yeah, And that's a really deep question. And so we started out with prehistoric man feeling like the universe is full of random not random, but unexplained agency and intelligence all the way to like now, scientific physical determinism says, actually, the universe just clicks along like a watch, right, and there's no free will. So let's take one step back from that, and that's chaos. That says, well, maybe the universe is deterministic, sure, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily practical for you to predict it because the way things play out is really sensitive to exactly how things started.
Well, I think I think some people who responded to their question maybe weren't sure about the difference, right, Like, what's the difference between something being chaotic and something being random? Right?
And so let's drill into that. So let's take, for an example, the roll of a dice. Right, people think of rolling dice as random, but actually it's chaotic, meaning that it's hard to predict, but it is deterministic.
Oh what do you mean?
If you knew exactly how I threw the dice, like exactly the direction and the spin, and all the molecules of the air, then you could treat them all like the little cannon balls, little particles. Then you could model how it rolls, and you could in theory, predict exactly how the dice rolled every time.
Meaning like if if I'm seeing footage of you throwing to die, and like I pause the video just as the die leave your hands, then I could you know know where they are, I know which direction are going, how fast they're going. I could run some kind of computer simulation to like follow the die and predict what they're going to do when they bounce off the table and roll around. I could potentially predict what the dye are going to show.
That's right, because we're saying that the universe in that case is deterministic, and so you should be able to predict the future given enough information about the setup. Right now, that's a hard problem, and that's why we use dice, right because it's really difficult and nobody can practically like bring a mini computer into Las Vegas and use that to predict who's going to win it Craps, right though, in theory, In theory, you could if the universe was deterministic but very sensitive to exactly how somebody's rolling the dice. Right, when you throw the dice at Craps, if you flip it this way or that way, then it's going to bounce slightly differently, and how it's going to hit that the felt on the table. It's all very very sensitive, and a very small change and how you throw it can result in a totally different number. That's what we mean by chaos.
It means that it's like the butterfly effect, right, like the idea that if you butterfly flaps is wighing here, it's going to have a huge effect, maybe potentially on the weather and on the other side of the world. It's like a very sensitive system.
That's right. The weather is a great example because we understand all the processes of weather. I mean, it's hot air, it's cold air, it's water. We know that stuff. It's pretty simple chemistry. But all together, an entire planet is really difficult to describe because it's huge and it's really sensitive. Like, as you say, a butterfly flapping its wings in China could change the way this air flows, which could change the way that air flows, which bounces off this building, which turns into a rainstorm, which collides with this cloud and causes a hurricane. Right, it's not true that every time a butterfly flaps its wings you get a hurricane. But sometimes so.
Weather is chaotic, but it's not random, is that what you're saying that rent Like, if we could keep track of every single butterfly in the world flapping its wing, we would be able to predict the weather if we had a giant supercomputer the size of the Solar System. But since we don't, then weather it seems random, But actually it's chaotic exactly.
And that's exactly what scientists are trying to do. They're building bigger and bigger and faster computers to try to simulate more and more of the Earth's atmosphere to get better and better predictions of weather. In fact, I think like all the top ten supercomputers in the world are devoted to that problem, like modeling the weather, because it's important. But you're exactly right, it's actually chaotic, meaning it's deterministic but really sensitive to exactly how it started. But it seems random because it's too difficult for us to calculate, and principle we should be able to, but we can't. Another example is flipping a coin. Right, Based on how you flip the coin, you should be able to model how it spins through the air and how it bounces off air molecule, and how it hits the ground and where it lands. Right, But it's a difficult problem. So we can use it to model randomness to say it's kind of like randomness. Really it's just chaotic though, But.
Then if I flip the coin one hundred times, most likely half of those times will behead and half of those times will be tails. Right, So where does that fit into chaos theory? Like why is it predictable on a statistical basis?
Okay, fascinating, that's an emergent phenomenon, right. That says, if you understand the tiny, little local laws of physics, like the laws of how the particles inside the coin move, you should be able to predict some larger effect. And it's true, there is a simple or description of that larger effect. Right, if you understand how these things work, So physics works on these layers. Right. You can either understand it a very low layer and try to model it all the way up to a higher layer, or you can just try to get an understanding of at a higher layer, just the same way. You could say, well, I can understand the way canniball flies by modeling all the particles inside of it, or you could just use F equals M, which treats the whole canniball like one particle. If that's just a question of at what layer you're modeling something? Right?
Okay, so a coin is chaotic but not actually random.
But not actually random yet if the universe is deterministic, then a coin is chaotic but not actually random.
Yeah, okay, got it, got it.
But then there's the question of that's the really the nugget of the question is is the universe deterministic? You know, if you have a particle or a billiard ball or cannonball or whatever, and you understand direction it's going, can you predict its future out into infinity? Right?
Right?
Can you tell exactly what's going to happen?
But there's so many factors leading up to me tossing the coin that it's so unpredictable that it's it feels random.
That's right. And so we have to separate between what's practical and what's in theory possible. Okay, anything that's chaotic. We're saying, in theory, if you knew enough, you could predict it, right, whereas but in practice that we can't. So it's it's so it seems seems random.
Random number of generators and computers when they try to come up with a random number, it's not really random, you're saying, it's just an algorithm. That's very that's chaotic.
That's right. Computers, by construction are deterministic, right, We've built them to be deterministic. Every time you run a program, it should give you the same answer if you give it the same input, right, Right, there's no way for computer to do anything but that. It's like a series of life gates. And you know, how it's implemented is not important. But you know, it's a system for doing deterministic calculations. That's what a computer is. So it's impossible for computer to be truly random.
Right.
All the random number generators in your favorite Python code are actually pseudo random number generators. They're just chaotic. They take a seed a number to start from, and then they spin off of that and generate a sequence of numbers. But if you give them the same seed twice, they'll generate the same sequence of numbers twice. Wow.
So like if you're playing a video game and you're inside of a virtual world, that world is totally determinating. Absolutely, it's been crunched on by a logical computer.
Exactly, you do the same move every time, You'll kill that boss character every single time. And not even in sillyvator games like you know, like punch Out where the guy is totally predictable, but even in more complicated ones. You know, if you're in the same world and you do the same thing, the same thing should happen, because computers are not capable of true randomness.
Before we keep going, let's take a short break.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, but the people in the dairy industry are US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too, Go safely. California From the California Office of traffic safety and caltrans.
With the United Explorer Card, earn fifty thousand bonus miles, then head for places unseen and destinations unknown. Wherever your journey takes you, you'll enjoy remarkable rewards, including a free checked bag and two times the miles on every United purchase. You'll also receive two times the miles on dining and at hotels, so every experience is even more rewarding. Plus, when you fly United, you can look forward to United Club Access with two United Club one time passes per year. Become a United Explorer Card member today and take off on more trips so you can take in once in a lifetime experiences everywhere you travel. Visit the Explorer Card dot com to apply today. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval, offer subject to change.
Terms apply.
So the question is is our universe like a computer simulation? Right? Like the question is is is our universe also being crunched by a logical computer that can't be random?
That's right? And for a long time people thought the universe was deterministic. I mean, we were able to predict the outcome of every experiment. Things were going along really well.
And then of course we can throw a spaceship and land it on the moon.
That's pretty crazy, right, yeah, that well, that's pretty risky, but yeah, that's pretty amazing. You have to certainly have confidence in our ability to predict the future if you're going to get into that cannon ball get shot out into space. Right.
Well, I remember in Gratz Cloths, in this classic it's called linear dynamical systems. But I remember in class, this guy was so the professor was so cocky. He's like, of all the technologies that contributed to putting a man on the moon, this is the one that made it happen. This linear algebra equation, we would not be able to put a man in the mood. And so that that's how powerful this idea is, right, Like, if you can predict f equals in a you can put a man on the mood.
Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And it's given us great power over our environment. I mean, everything that we have is because we have mastered a lot of the laws of our environment and use them and bent them to our will to improve our lives. Right, So it certainly works, and we rely in every day, every time you get into a car or an airplane, you rely on it working the same way it did yesterday, right, right, right, So that's that's a relief. But it was about one hundred years ago when people started seeing things that they couldn't explain, and it was quantum mechanics that told us that maybe the universe is not deterministic. Maybe these little particles don't follow the same rules that like billiard balls and basketballs and larger objects follow, and maybe they're not even deterministic, meaning you do the same experiment twice with tiny particles, you could get different outcomes even if you do it exactly the same way.
And this all came about when people started noticing that like light and things had a minimum size, right, Like light doesn't come in infinitely small bits of light, Like there's chunks of light.
That's right. Yeah, Einstein was looking at some experiments it didn't quite make sense, and the only way he could explain them was if light came in little packets, and that's what quantum means. Quantum means a unit or a packet, and so he suggested that maybe light comes in these little packets. But then it had all these far reaching consequences, you know about light going through mirrors and through prisms, and the way people could understand that was only if there were various probabilities for things to happen, and it began this whole revolution of quantum mechanics, which then Einstein tried to put the brakes on, right. He was like, wait, hold on a second, guys, this is crazy talk. There's no way the universe works this.
Way, meaning like this idea of quantum stuff only made sense if the universe worked based on probabilities, not like deterministically. You know, you have to describe things with wave function, and things aren't really like point particles or kind of fuzzy things.
That's exactly the point is that there's this fuzziness in the universe and quantum mechanics because there's these minimum size objects and the way they interfere with each other and the way the calculations happen. Quantum mechanics predicts that the universe is fundamentally random, and it means that, for example, you have an electron, you don't know exactly where it is. There's a probability distribution that says, most likely it's here, maybe it's there, Maybe it's somewhere else.
Is it that we can't Is it like a randomness, like we can't know where it is, or that there's this trade off between like momentum and position.
Right, that's exactly the right question, and that's exactly what people were asking. They looked at these equations and they said, well, is it that we can't predict where the electron is, like it's totally impossible to predict, Or is it that we just don't know where it is that we haven't figured it out how to get that information? Right? Does the information not exist or do we just not have it? And so Einstein is the one who said it must be some hidden variable. There must be something that these particles are carrying, some piece of information that determines exactly what's going to happen to them, but we just don't know what it is.
Oh I see.
To him, it was crazy to think that you could shoot an electron into an experiment twice and get two different answers, But that's what appear to happen. People set up these careful experiments where you would shoot a photon one at a time. You would shoot photons into an experiment, and every photon would do something different, and then as you would accumulate a bunch of photons, it would add up to give you a distribution that made sense to you, just the same way when you flip a coin, you get heads, you get tails, you get heads, you get tails. It seems random, but eventually it builds up to fifty to fifty. Right, Quantum mechanics tells us all we can do is predict the eventual distribution. We can say, if you measure a thousand electrons, some of them will go here and some of them will go there. It says you can't predict any individual one. All you can predict is the distribution of outcomes.
So Eistin was like, maybe a photo on is kind of like the coin we were talking about before, Like maybe it seems random to us, but really it's just kind of this chain of little local events that actually make it predictable.
That's right.
If we knew all that information inside, Like maybe it just looks fuzzy to us and we can't tell where it is, but inside that particle really actually knows where it is.
It's exactly right.
That's what he wanted to believe, right.
That's what he wanted to believe, and you got to sympathize with the guy. Right, it's hard to imagine that the universe would not be deterministic. I mean, we spent hundreds of years building up our confidence in science and in physics, especially as being able to predict the future, and just of saying, basically, the universe follows rules. Right, So now all of a sudden, you're telling us, what there's like dice in there?
Right?
Is there some randomness like every time you shoot an electronics experiment, somebody or something or the universe is making like a random decision about where it's going to go. It seems crazy, So you're absolutely right. He suggested that a simpler explanation is that they're carrying along another piece of information that we just don't have access to or can't measure or didn't measure, and that that's actually determining in a totally predictable way what's going to happen to each particle. That was his solution to the problem.
Well, he famously said God doesn't play dice, right.
Famously quoted as saying that I'm not sure he actually did, but it's oh, it's really But it's a pretty good summary of what he believed.
Fake news about hindsight.
Well, like a lot of fake news is a kernel of truth in it. He certainly wanted to believe in a deterministic universe and it made sense to him. And you know what it makes sense to me. I mean the idea that there's like a true random number generator somewhere in the universe that's making a decision every time you shoot an electron into something. It doesn't make any sense to me intuitively. You know, not that the universe has to make sense to me intuitively, but it doesn't.
So you're saying, the quantum mechanics says that there is a randomness in things, and so where is that randomness actually in like the position of particles in the verb, their velocity, in their very being, in their energy level. Where is this randomness of everything?
Well, there's randomness at every level. I mean, there's randomness between every time you look at something. So say, for example, you measure an electron, you see it's a certain place, then you look away, right, because you can't monitor an electron every moment or every nanosecond. Even you look away, what does the electron do between when you last saw it and when you'll next see.
It, meaning like if I know where it is and how fast it's going, and then I look away and I look again, is it going to be where I think it's going to be?
Yes, exactly. And so every moment of an electron or a particle's life is determined by quantum mechanics, which says there's a probability distribution. It's not like the electron is doing something behind your back. It's got one particular path that you're just not aware of behind your back, and you just don't know it. It doesn't have a specific path. It's not like it goes from A to B via particular path. It has a probability of different ways to get there. WHOA And if you don't look, then it's sort of doing all of them at once. They all have different probabilities, and those probabilities are the things determined by the laws of physics. So there's still are laws. Physics still does tell the universe how to run. It's just that those laws are probabilistic. It says, look, mister electron, instead of telling you exactly where you're going to go, I'm going to say you have a seventy percent chance to doing this and a thirty percent chance of doing that.
So that's where the fuzziness and the randomness comes in. It's not that it like, it looks fuzzy, it's just that it's just hard to predict where it's going to be. It's impossible. I mean, you know all this information, it's impossible.
It's impossible to predict the future.
Impossible.
Exactly. You can predict the various likelihood of this or the likelihood of that at the particle level, but you can't say what one particle is going to do. Wow. Now, Einstein said, that's crazy, right, there's no way that's true. There must be a way to predict it must be there's some piece of information there. And then some guys came up with an experiment. They came up with this crazy experiment. It's based on an idea called bell inequality. To test this theory, they said, let's see if the universe is really random, or if there's some hidden piece of information that's actually secretly determining things.
Like let's see if I really can't predict where that electron it's going to go, or if it's actually like the electron knows it just won't tell us.
Yeah, right, exactly. And so they set up this cool experiment where they took a particle and they had to shoot out two particles in opposite directions. And those particles are therefore connected because they have to conserve momentum and they have to conserve energy and have to conserve spin. And so if you know something about one particle, then you know something about the other particle. But both particles have equal probability to be like spin up or spin down, or point this way a point the other way, but you know something about the combination of the two. And so they came up with this really ingenious experiment to measure how often you saw one spin up and one spin down, for example, And based on the outcome of that, you could tell whether there was a secret, hidden piece of inft that was controlling both particles or whether they were both truly random. And the experiments are conclusive, and it has been done as zillion times. And the experiment tells us that the universe at its core really is random. That's making a random decision every time you look at these particles.
So beyond the shadow of a doubt, we know that the universe is random.
The universe is random. Absolutely, there's no there's no escape clause, there's no if hands or butts, there's no there's no loopholes. The universe at the particle level is really random. Now, you said something really interesting earlier. You know, even if the universe is random at the lowest level, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's random at other levels, right, Like we still got to the moon. Right. It's not like we're saying science doesn't work or you shouldn't get in that airplane. Right. Science works at different levels, And even if it's random at the very very small level, doesn't mean that on average it's really predictable, right, Like we do know how basketballs bounce, right, And that's because the randomness only applies to these tiny little particles, and over the ten to the thirty or whatever particles in a basketball, that all averages out to something very very predictable.
Wow, So like random events Canada add up to predictable events? Is that kind of what you're saying?
Yeah, exactly, Like you can't tell how any individual voter is going to vote, but if you've done enough polls, you can tell you know how the nation is going to vote. At a cereal election.
That worked out so well in the twenty sixteen election.
Yeah, maybe that wasn't the best example.
Totally predictable. At the level of particles, there is randomness, but maybe in the macroscale things are fairly predictable. Yeah, well, but how does that affect things like free will? Does that mean that, like my brain, does quantum randomness give me some sort of unpredictability or free will as you might call it, or is my brain also very predictable in the long run.
It's a great question, and into the tiny crack in determinism, you know, saying that at the particle level, things are truly random. And there's flooded and enormous literature of consciousness and all sorts of philosophy that try to connect free will to quantum randomness, you know, to say that this is the whole we needed, This is what breaks determinism and allows for me and my soul and God and all the and all the things you want to cram into your universe.
Right.
I'm not convinced that quant mechanics allows for free will, or for souls or you know, for all that kind of stuff, but it certainly does dismantle the deterministic watch like universe that we thought we had m So.
Just because something is random doesn't mean you have free will, Like it's just random.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And to sort of answer the question, you know, is the universe random or is it chaotic? Turns out it's kind of both. Right. It's random at the particle level, but it's chaotic at the macroscopic level. Right, Things do seem to be fairly deterministic at the macroscopic level, but then again they're too chaotic to really to really model. So it's not like you can predict the weather.
It's kind of a progression. Like it's random at the particle level. It's kind of deterministic at a medium range level, but then as you get to larger and larger systems, then it's chaotic and it's practically unpredictable.
Yeah, yeah, exactly right, So any answer you want there's some place in the universe.
Is yeah, I just pick a random, random answer and it will be yes.
So maybe that's why people answered it's such a such streams of gibberish to our question, because because they really deeply understood that the universe was both random and chaotic.
Wow, wisdom of the crowd, the.
Wisdom of the crowd. Exactly, you average over ten random people and there is some insight. Yeah, exactly, that's the whole that's the whole problem.
The answer is the answer is yes.
So I think it's it's fun to think about that inste of the larger context. You know, like we started off thinking the universe was crazy, then we started to get some grips on it. Then we felt like, oh, oh, maybe the universe is sort of too tight a grip on us because it seems deterministic. And then we got this crack thanks to quantum mechanics that says it's random. But I don't really know how comfortable people are with that crack. You know, to think that the universe doesn't know what it's going to do at any moment, like they could do this, it could do that. That's sort of terrifying. I understand Einstein's fear. That Einstein's dislike or disdain for that, and that leaves us in a sort of uncomfortable position.
And it might get even crazier. Right, Like, let's say that we build quantum computers and then there's AI based on quantum computers that that would be even crazier.
Right, Yeah, I'd love to read that science fiction novel. That's how that's how AI develops free will.
Right, quantum computers, maybe more than.
Us, that's exactly right.
All right, Well, thank you for joining us. I hope that didn't seem like a random, random or chaotic discussion.
But those are really fun topics. I think it's super fun to try to wrap your mind around those things. And you know, one of the basic questions of physics is not just what is the world made out of or what are the bits and pieces? Butre like, what are the rules? And are there rules? And you know, can we ever understand it? To me, that's one of the deepest questions of science. And this goes right to the heart of it.
So if you're a butterfly out there, keep on flam exactly.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard. Every day. I find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety in Caltrans.
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an explore and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval offer, subject to change.
MS apply
