Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Katie grapple with an effort to explain how quantum mechanics could arise from relativity.
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What's that? Mago?
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It's me Katie Couric. You know if you've been following me on social media, you know I love to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoyke, Alison Roman and Ininagarten. So I started a free newsletter called good Taste to share recipes, tips and kitchen mustaves. Just sign up at Katiecuric dot com slash good Taste. That's k A t I E c o u r ic dot com slash good Taste. I promise your taste buds will be happy you did.
Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos, but Eagelman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcastsy Katie, are.
You a fan of Italian food.
Well, I live in Italy, so here we just call it food.
But yeah, all right, Well what about Italian American food? You know, the version made by Italian immigrants to America.
Yeah, no, I like it. It's more meatballs and more garlic, but that's still really good.
Well what about the opposite, what about American Italian food?
So is that cuisine made by American immigrants who are in Italy?
Yeah?
Basically you Well.
I mean I mostly just have coffee and toast, which would be a really short cookbook.
Maybe you should try innovating. Have you ever tried putting a meatball in your coffee?
I know I have not tried to do that, Dan, could.
Be a cultural revolution.
Well, it would indeed be revolting.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at uc Ervine, and I don't like anything in my coffee, definitely not meatballs.
Hi.
I am Katie. I host a podcast called Creature feature on evolutionary biology, and I like a huge amount of sugar in my coffee. So we could see how that is with meatballs as well.
Well, that makes me wonder since you're a biologist, tell me, who are the natural consumers of coffee? Like, who out there in the animal world is eating coffee beans off the tree.
That's the thing is that coffee caffeine in coffee plants is to be slightly toxic to insects that want to eat it. And it's the same story for spicy foods. It's actually defense mechanism, and so the insects that will try to eat these plants will not farewell. But when we have it, it's actually delicious and good. Now, there are palm civets who will eat types of coffee plants. They eat the berries, and there's actually a coffee drink made out of the beans collected from the palm civet hoop and it's very expensive. Wow.
I don't know what blows my mind more there the fact that we are sipping insect poison, or the fact that that whole strategy is backfired on the coffee tree because it attracts us, or how quickly a biologist will turn the conversation towards poop.
The latter is the least surprising.
That is neat and where we overlap the darkest matters in the universe. And welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe the production of iHeartRadio, in which we try to do just that. Explore everything that's out there in the universe, ask our deepest, darkest questions about who is sipping which bits of the universe and why they exist in that way? What are the tiniest particles that everything is made out of, What are the rules by which they play? How do they come together to make civets and cats and poops and coffee and biologists who wonder about all those things combined? Is it possible to understand and explain the universe? We're going to try.
That is the first thing I think of when I think about civet, kat poop is the tiniest of particles that make up that coffee. But yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess when you can go down really really tiny, and that makes things like poop less gross because now you're just on the atomical level and these are just atoms. They don't smell. Atoms don't smell bad.
I don't think, well, does it make poop less gross to think that it's made of the same basic building blocks as everything else, or does it make everything else more gross to know that ice cream and lava and kittens are made out of the same stuff as poop.
Interesting question, ice cream, lava, and.
Kittens, let's put a pin in that, But let's dive deep into what the universe is made out of. One of our deepest questions in physics, and a question that humans have been asking basically since humans have been asking questions, is how do things work at the smallest scale? Is it possible to zoom down on what's around us and explain things in simpler and simpler terms, Because you know, you start out with a huge number of things out there in the universe blueberries and cats, and ice cream and coffee, and biologists and physicists and everything in between. It's an incredible variety. But when you dig down a little bit, you discuss, Oh, everything out there is made out of about one hundred basic building blocks, the elements of the periodic table. Combined in different ways, you can make essentially everything. And even that set of one hundred building blocks is made out of an even smaller set of stuff. Right, Protons and neutrons and electrons make up all of those atoms, which means that the same stuff can be used to make lava or kittens, or ice cream or poops, or biologists or stars. All that stuff is made out of the same thing.
It's interesting because I do know that one of the things that unites kittens and lava and poop is that it all obeys the laws of physics. If you throw a kitten in some lava, you're going to have a predictable result because of the laws of physics. Both the kitten and the lava are constrained by the laws of physics. But the thing that's interesting to me, and that hurts my brain a little bit, is that when you look at, say like a very tiny quantum particle, it does not necessarily obey the same laws of physics as say a marble. So you know, I think of like a marble bonking into another marble. I can somewhat understand how that works. But then you go down small enough and it's not just tiny atomic marbles bonking into each other. Weird stuff happens that blows my mind.
It is incredible that the laws of physics seem to be different at different scales, like at different distances or different energies. It seems like different rules apply, like to baseballs and to electrons. The rules are fundamentally different. There are different kinds of stuff and the rules that apply to them are different, and that does feel weird, and it's one of the most incredible things about the universe. But a helpful way to think about it is in terms of phases. Like think about water. Water has a liquid phase and a solid phase and a gas phase. Right in the end, we think it's all made out of the same basic stuff water molecules, but the act differently under different circumstances. And you wouldn't expect the laws of an ideal gas to describe what happens when water crystallizes, or fluid dynamics to explain how a gas would expand different rules apply in different scenarios, different phases, And so we imagine that the universe is organized the same way you can think of You can think of it as sort of different phases where different rules apply. What we don't know is if there is an underlying theory behind all of it, the sort of physics version of the water molecule, the tiniest little bits who's dancing and tuing and frowing and interacting is somehow making all this other stuff emerge, even the quantum particles, even the baseballs, even the galaxies. Is there something at the lowest level which is determining everything from which all of our experience emerges.
So this is an interesting and confusing question to me, because from my understanding, if we're all in the same universe, we would all regardless of whether we're a human or a quark or a kitten, we'd have to play by the same rules. But if the rules are different somehow, right, like for a quark versus a kitten in terms of physics, even though the kitten is also made out of quarks or atoms molecules, it's hard for me to wrap my head around there not being a unifying set of rules that applies to everything, given that not only do we live in the same universe, but we're made out of all the same stuff.
Yeah, it's a great question, and a basic assumption about a lot of physics is that that's possible that if you zoom down to the smallest scale, you can find the most basic set of rules, and that then you could somehow zoom back out with the fundamental theory of the universe in hand, you could explain everything it might require you to calculate like how ten to the twenty nine particles come together to make a baseball. But the idea is, in principle, it's all determined by what's happen happening at the smaller scale that when you zoom out, that's just what those laws look like. And it might be the case, right It might be that even though we have trouble explaining how a zillion water droplets interacting in the atmosphere make a hurricane, we can't even do it with our fastest supercomputers. We think that probably it is determined by that, But that's actually a philosophical assumption, and some philosophers of science disagree with that. It's called strong emergence, and some point to lots of things that we can't explain using underlying details. A great example is like why you are here your consciousness? We have completely failed so far to explain the experience of human consciousness in terms of like the zapping of the little neurons inside of our brains. It might be that somehow all that stuff comes together to explain why you are experiencing this podcast right now. But it might also be that there are just different rules at different levels of the universe that aren't actually determined by the lower levels. That that's somehow there are independent layers of the universe and different rules apply with each one. It's a weird philosophy of the universe, but it might also be our universe that's.
Very hard for my conscious brain to wrap itself around. It is very interesting, this philosophical question of consciousness because if we apply sort of the rules of like, well, a brain works right because you have a communication between many parts, you have neurons that are all communicating with each other and forming these networks. Well, there's a lot of things that do that, from computers to ant colonies, and so the question is, well, are those things conscious as well? And we can't really quantify that, and we can't know whether even though it seems like there's this underlying rule of you know, you require these sort of individual units that are all communicating together and forming patterns, and that's what you need for consciousness. If you see that repeated in other systems, whether that actually applies to say, can you recreate a consciousness with an electronic version of neurons or is something like a very complex ant colony with thousands of ants? Does that recreate consciousness. So I guess in a way I could see how there could be different rules applying to different layers, but it's just so strange and so like. Currently, when we look at like quantum mechanics, it does not do a good job of explaining physics on a larger scale.
Mostly we cannot connect the layers that we have. Even though that's basically the motivation for the project to understand everything at the smallest scale and use that to explain everything else that's bigger, we have very rarely succeeded in using a zoomed in microscopic approach to explain anything bigger.
You know.
One famous success story is ideal gases. Is say, okay, we have this picture of atoms moving in a gas as tiny little balls. Can we zoom out and think about what happens to ten to the twenty nine balls, and can we write equations that tell mathematical stories about things that emerge from ten to the twenty nine tiny little gas molecules like pressure and temperature and volume, and we can you can actually derive, like the ideal gas law from statistical mechanics explanations about the velocities of those tiny little particles. That's a famous example because it's one of the rare successes. Mostly we have failed because the universe is kind of chaotic. It's really sensitive often to these tiny little details. What happens to this quantum particle affects another quantum particle, which affects another quantum particle. We don't understand how to do that calculation. Most of the time, we don't have the computing power, and we can't avoid this chaos problem. So mostly we don't know how to do that. It might be that it is determined and it's possible to do those calculations, it's just sort of beyond our ability right now. Or it might be that it's just not that different rules apply in different regimes, as weird as that is.
So, I guess I'm not so familiar with quantum mechanics and general relativity. Can we kind of just hammer down, like what are those two things? How Like what do they apply to and what don't they apply to?
So at the forefront of our understanding of the most microscopic picture of how the universe works, we have two basic theories. We have quantum mechanics, which tells us about really tiny stuff, and general relativity, which tells us about really big heavy stuff, basically quantum mechanics for particles and general relativity for gravity. One of the biggest frustrations in physics in the last one hundred years has been our inability to bring them together into a single story, to weave them into a unified picture of how the universe works. You know, this whole project of like, let's explain everything from the tiniest particles and then zoom out. Well, we haven't even succeeded in explaining the tiniest particles yet, but there's a vigorous program of people working on this stuff. And in today's episode, we're going to dig into one of the most recent and weirdest ideas about how to bring quantum mechanics and relativity together. So on today's episode, we're going to be answering the question, what is quantum relativity?
Hmmm, quantum relativity. So it's like quantum mechanics and general relativity had a baby.
It also sounds like a buzzword name for a startup where you're like, I don't even really know what it they do, but it sounds pretty good. So before we dig into the details of this, I checked in with our listeners to see if they had any idea about the theory of quantum relativity, if they had heard of this before, if they had thoughts about it. Thanks very much to everybody who participates in this audience feedback segment of the podcast. We really love hearing your voice and hearing your thoughts on the question.
Of the day.
If you would like to participate, please don't be shy. Just write to me to Questions at Danielandjorge dot com and I'll hook you up. So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, have you heard of quantum relativity? What do you think that might mean. Here's what some listeners had to say.
Quantum relativity. I'm guessing that is the theory that brings quantum mechanics and general relativity together. So something that the theory that figures out how you work gravity and quantum mechanics together. Since gravity, we're not quite sure how that works on the smallest scales.
That is really really tiny relativity.
To me, that sounds like a parallel to general relativity. So I bet that it has to do with how particles interact with each other when in proximity to each other. On a quantum scale.
I love the answer really tiny relativity because it makes me think of some ants or some mites or tartar grades in the lab coats drawing on tiny chalkboards.
Exactly. Also, quantum just sometimes means like fancy or st nazi, or we're going to charge you an extra ten bucks for it, So like expensive relativity.
This is a quantum salad for twelve dollars.
Exactly.
I'd like to upgrade my salad, actually do a quantum salad. Or I ordered quantum on my salad and I didn't get enough.
Could mean anythings, a.
Complaint anything, Well, we're going to see today. The quantum relativity is the name of a new effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, and they really do give it that name for a reason. But before that's going to make any sense to us, we really have to understand the basics of like what is quantum mechanics in general relativity, why do we want to unify them, and why is it so hard?
Right? Yes, because like you were kind of saying earlier, general relativity is for big stuff. Quantum mechanics is for tiny stuff. But it's got to be a little more detailed than that I would imagine.
No, that's basically it take quantum mechanics, generativity like all done in fifteen minutes. But listeners of the podcast will remember that general relativity basically describes space and time. Special relativity is a theory that tells us about how light moves and how observers always see light moving at the same speed, and general relativity is what explains gravity. Remember Newton had the idea that gravity was a force that things with mass pulled on each other, and that's why the Earth goes around the Sun and you feel like you're falling towards the Earth because he described gravity as this force. But Einstein tells us that gravity is not a force. Gravity is not capable of accelerating anything, and that things are actually moving according to the invisible curvature of space and time.
This is the thing that is so hard for me to really visualize or hold in my head because every kind of analogy I try to make is based in physics, like a ball rolling down a hill or something, or you know, I think of the fact of space being sort of pulled in a certain direction, and it's like that's still physics. In the sense of like, you know, a fabric being pulled and something falling into it, Whereas like the idea of gravity being sort of the shape of the universe in a way that like makes sense in my head is very hard to grasp. I understand it in a certain way, but to visualize it is so difficult.
It is very tricky because it changes your entire concept of what space is. Right. We used to think of space as like nothingness and stuff is there and it can move through space. But it turns out that there is something to space, like between two points, there's information information about how that space is curved or bent, and that affects how stuff moves through that space. And yeah, there's a lot of examples out there in popular science literature. I think most of us are very confusing. You know, the idea of like a rubber sheet and you have a ball on the sheet, and the rubber sheet is bent and that makes the curve. That's very confusing because you still have to have gravity in that example in the vertical direction. You give this like external third dimension of gravity in your two D world. I think that's very very misleading. I prefer to think about it in three D and remember that this curvature is intrinsic. It's not external. It's not like there's somebody else out there with a ruler in real space who's telling us our space is bent relative to their space. The curvature is intrinsic. There's no external ruler. It just means that the relative distances between two points change, which means like the shortest path from A to B might not be a straight line that you would draw if you ignore the curvature. Once you know what the curvature is, there might be a shorter path between A and B, and that's the path that light will take. Light always takes the shortest path between two points.
So if I'm standing on my bed and I'm going to jump off the bed, as I do every morning, so I am subject to the gravity of Earth, and it's not so much that it's only me down, but just that I am traveling along the shortest path from point A, which is my bed, to point B, which is the other point of space. But it's more or less just interrupted by the floor.
Yeah, that's a great example. Let's think about it first from the Newtonian point of view, and then let's reboot and think about it from an Einsteinian point of view. So Newton would say, you're standing on your bed. There's the force of gravity pulling down on you from the Earth, and there's the force of your bed pushing up, and those two things are balanced, so you're not going anywhere. Then you jump off your bed. No longer is the bed pushing you up, and so now you're falling because it's just the force of gravity, and that's accelerating you down towards the center of the Earth. That's the way people mostly learn about gravity. That's how Newton described it. That's where we start. Einstein says something different. Einstein says, well, when you're standing on your bed, you actually are being accelerated. There's only one force there. There's the force of your bed. What's it pushing you against. It's pushing you against your natural motion, which is to fall all towards the center of the earth. So Newton says, you're accelerating when after you jump off the bed and you're falling towards the center. Einstein says, no, you were accelerating when you were on your bed. It's when you jump off your bed that you're now following the natural curvature of space. You're no longer accelerating. The only force in this scenario is the force of the bed on you, and that's keeping you from naturally moving towards the center of the Earth. When you're standing on the bed. Once you jump off, you're the one in free fall. And you can actually measure this because you can take an accelerometer something which measures your acceleration. I mean, the scale is basically a gravitometer, and you can measure when are you feeling acceleration. If you jump off your bed and you're holding a scale and you put it under your feet, what are you going to weigh. You're going to weigh nothing because it's no force between you and the scale. But if the scale's on your bed and you're standing on it, then you're going to see your weight. And that's because that's where you're accelerating. It's when you're on your bed.
That's so interesting. Yeah, I can totally visualize that. Also, I knew that when I sleep in, I wasn't lazy because I've been accelerating the whole time.
So this is Einstein's picture of gravity, and it's massively successful.
Right.
It describes the motion of everything in the universe, the expansion of the universe, incredibly high precision black holes oscillating around each other, neutron stars getting gobbled by black holes, gravitational waves. It's been tested in and out and up the wazoo for decades and decades, and it's this beautiful geometric picture of the universe that tells us gravity is not a force. It's just the way things are flowing through the geometry of space and time. And the things to take away from this discussion are that it's one deterministic right. It says that things move in a certain way because of geometry. It's no randomness, there's no probability. It's not like when you jump off your bed you have a chance of landing here or there. It's determined by exactly where you are in the shape of space. And the other is that it mostly affects really really big stuff because gravity is super weak. Whether it's a force or the curvature of space time, it takes a lot of mass to have any effect. You know, you can like overcome all the gravity of the Earth or the curvature of space and time caused by the Earth using a simple kitchen magnet right, or your legs can overcome it. You can leap off the surface of the Earth, which means it applies mostly to really massive objects. So it's deterministic and it applies to really massive stuff. That's the important things to remember when we're going to talk about trying to integrate it with quantum.
Mechanics, because that's in the opposite direction where it is extremely extremely tiny stuff like as a human being. Gravity is something where it's hard to you know, really visualize like the scope of say like the size of the Sun or this even the size of the planet. Sure you can go on a plane and kind of see part of it, but it's it's still hard to visualize how big these things are, how massive it is, and then similarly, going into quantum mechanics visualizing how tiny these things can be. So there really as opposite as you can get in terms of size and scope.
They are like the ying and ying of physics. But we hope they click together to make one holistic picture. But let's dig into how quant mechanics explains the tiniest stuff in the universe. But first let's take a quick break.
All right, I'm going to try to start thinking small.
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Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, I'm trying to think inside a very tiny box and hopefully that will help me.
As you mentioned already, the rules seemed to be different for things like baseball and planets than things like electrons and photons and tiny little particles, which is really the source of one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics, how that all works and whether we can bring it together.
Right, Because I think I had some concept before ever coming on this show, which is that with the small stuff, the really tiny quantum level stuff, there was some sort of like average you could take of its behavior, and then that would be well integrated into say, other types of physics like general relativity, where it's like, well, you know, you just scale up averages of the small stuff's activity and then that would fit in some perfect formula and represent general relativity. But turns out it's not so simple.
No.
It turns out the rules of these two concepts are fundamentally different and tell really different stories about the nature of the universe we live in. About one hundred years ago, people did experiments which showed us that when you zoom in to the tiniest level, the rules really do seem to be different. Amazingly, it was Einstein who played a role in both of these revolutions. He of course came up with relativity, but he also had the idea of how to interpret the photoelectric effect, which kicked off the entire quantum revolution as well, So that dude was pretty central.
What's the photo reflective effect?
This is the experiment where you shine bright light at a piece of metal and you see a bunch of electrons boil off. And the idea is, okay, the electrons are absorbing the light, they're getting energy, they're boiling off. The weird thing about the experiment was as you turn up the brightness of the light, like the intensity of the light, you expected to get electrons with more energy because you're shining brighter light at it. But instead what you got were more electrons. And this really puzzled people. They're like, why can't the electrons get more energy. And the answer in the end is that light is made of these tiny little packets. It's not a continuous beam, it's a bude of little packets of energy, and each electron can basically only absorb one. It's like one interaction between a photon and n electron. So when you turn up the brightness of the beam, which you get are more electrons absorbing photons, not one electron absorbing more photons. And so that was the clue that told people, oh, look, maybe light is made of these little packets, and that kicked off the whole quantum revolution that showed us that everything out there is actually made of these little discrete bits that follow very different rules.
It's like these electrons are flying ryanair and they can only have one packet per electron.
That's right.
Otherwise you get some quantum fees for extra carryons.
Is that a very small fee or a very big fee?
Small fees that add up to a lot because of interference with your pocketbook?
I think?
Ain't that how it is?
Anybody out there who works for the airlines, do not take this as a creative idea for how to add fees. Okay, I don't want to see quantum fees on my quantum fees.
That's going to be the next thing.
And what emerged for the next twenty or thirty years of studying experiments and shining lights on things and looking inside the atom, or a new set of rules for how tiny stuff worked. This tiny stuff didn't follow the rules of planets and baseballs. You couldn't make a picture of the atom that literally had electrons orbiting the center of the atom. That just didn't work. The physics of it didn't make sense. Those electrons in an orbit would radiate away all their energy and collapse into the nucleus because anything that's moving in a circle is accelerating, and things that accelerate have to give off radiation in order to keep bending. But we don't see electrons collapsing into the center of the atom and tend to the negative thirteen seconds. I told us that the rules were fundamentally different, and we came up with a completely new kind of mathematics, quantum mechanics Schrodinger's equation that describe the rules of the quantum realm which were totally different from the rules of baseballs and electrons. Baseballs move through space, they have a path, like they're here and then they are there, and so you know they went from here to there. They have a location at every moment, and you can string those locations together to make a smooth and continuous path. Just sort of makes sense to you that everything has to be somewhere at all times. But electrons don't follow those rules. That's an intuition you developed from your experience of baseballs and rocks and other kinds of stuff. Electrons can be here and then they can be there, and they don't have to go from here to there. They don't always have to have a determined location. They can exist in probabilistic form where they can say, well, I might be here and I might be there. It's not determined much more than just being not known. It's actually not determined by the uni.
Right, because it's hard to understand this sometimes where you think in these kinds of thought experiments of like an electron not knowing sort of the location of electron or the spin of something. It's like I think sometimes I have this concept of like, well, this is just sort of some kind of weird math. It's not actually describing what's actually happening. But I would assume there's like evidence that is what's actually happening, that this is not these positions are not have experimentally been shown to not be like determined by the universe.
Yeah, there's a whole really fascinating set of experiments that explore this question, like is it just something we don't know or is it really undetermined by the universe? Is there some like extra information the electron is carrying that we're just not aware of that actually tells where the universe is, like keeping track of where it really is, and we just don't know. And it's a set of experiments proposed by John Bell to probe a theory called bell inequalities, And we have a whole set of podcasts about those Whether quantum mechanics really is random or not. And the upshot is that it seems like it really is random. There are some loopholes there, how you might have like some sort of like non local pilot wave that's controlling the whole universe. But the most mainstream interpretation is that it really is random. There really is some non determinism to the universe that you could do the same experiment twice exactly the same setup and get different answers like you're shoot an electron into an experiment with exactly the same conditions twice and it'll end up going left once and it'll end up going right another time. That there's like a die being thrown by the universe to determine where an electron goes. It's crazy, it's bonkers, but that's the universe we live in, So.
It'd be like if you like, you know, there's the classic thing that even babies. This is so interesting about human cognition is that babies have a sort of baseline understanding of physics. It seems like if they see a little marble hit a big marble, they don't expect the big marble to go flying off. And if you show them that, they look they kind of stare at it because it's surprising to them. But you know, because we kind of have this this innate understanding that if a little thing hits a big thing, the big thing isn't going to go shooting off, whereas if the big thing hits the little thing, it's going to go shooting off. And like, if we hit things at a certain angle, it's gonna you know, go at a certain direction, just like I guess that's how people can be good at pool. Not me, but other people. And so it would be shocking though, if you're if you're good at pool and you shoot something at a certain angle and it's just completely random about of whether it goes left or right, or forward or backwards, or up or down.
It is a really weird way to think about the universe. I was recently trying to explain this stuff to my sixteen year old who's taking chemistry and was learning about the atomic structure and all this stuff and photons and probabilities, and it was pretty bewildering, but it was a fun experience of trying to download into his mind this new way of thinking about the universe. But it really is counterintuitive because you don't ever experience it. And that's one of the big mysteries of quantum mechanics, is why not. Because when we interact with quantum stuff, it tends to collapse. It says, oh, I have a bunch of possibilities, but I'm just going to pick one now. When a photon hits your eyeball, it decides, oh, I'm here or I'm there. When an electron hits the screen, the universe decides for some reason, the universe has this distinction between tiny little stuff that can exist with uncertainty and bigger stuff which can't. People sometimes describe this as acting like a particle or acting like a wave. Really, the distinction is between classical physics like general relativity that's talking about stuff having specific locations, and quantum physics, where stuff can still have uncertainty.
So quantum physics would be the particle and general relativity would be the wave or vice versa.
So quantum physics is about tiny little stuff, but it's the wave like behavior of that stuff that's really weird because the wave appears in the shorting earthqua and people tend to think about particles as having like a definite location, like you've seen this particle on the screen. So general relativity in classical physics more broadly thinks about stuff as having definitive locations. It is here, it is there, it was here, And quantum mechanics says that there can be uncertainty. So quantum is the more wavy stuff, and in this case, the classical theory is more like definitive locations, which people sometimes describe as acting like a particle.
So quantum mechanics is kind of whibbly wobbly.
Yeah, that's exactly right. So these are two very different pictures of the world, right, things moving along classical paths where they always have a definitive location at every time, or things being wibbly wobbling, being undetermined. And you might think, well, it should be pretty easy to figure out which is right. Can't we do experiments to tell us which one is predicting things correctly? Right, Often you have two theories, you just do an experiment, you say, well, which one is right? And the problem is that it's so hard to do an experiment where both of them have something to say. Most of the universe is divided up into stuff where general relativity is important and quantum mechanics can be ignored, like the motion of planets, or stuff where quantum mechanics is important and general relativity can be ignored, like two electrons bouncing off of each other.
Right, Like you could do a physics experiment on a baseball, But then to do a physics experiment and a quantum level experiment on the baseball's electrons at the same time in a way that makes sense seems very difficult.
Exactly when you do an experiment with baseballs, you can pretty much ignore the fact that it's made from ten to twenty nine tiny buzzing particles, and you can just use Newton's laws F equals ma to describe its path very very accurately. That's because the quantum effects tend to average out. For reason this again, we don't really know how that works or why that works, but it does. So quantum effects tend to disappear when you zoom out far enough. On the other hand, when you zoom in far enough, gravity is so weak that it becomes irrelevant. Like we do collisions between protons all the time at the Large Hadron Collider, but we always ignore their gravity, Like there is a gravitational attraction we think between the protons, but protons have such tiny masses that we can essentially ignore their gravity when we do those calculations.
I mean that makes sense because even though technically, even as people, we have gravity, it's not like we can suck things into ourselves. I know that's not how gravity works, but still we are not generating enough of a gravitational effect that things, you know, fall into our bodies. And so what chance does a proton have exactly?
You can't blame gravity for the reason you ate that pint of ice cream. It didn't just like fall into your body.
That was my alibi.
But that's exactly right. We could hardly even measure the gravity between things that are like a kilogram. The smallest thing we've ever measured gravity for is just about a kilogram, and protons are a tiny, tiny action of that, where like thirty orders of magnitude away from being able to measure the gravity of a proton, and more than that, we don't even understand what the gravity of a proton would look like. You know, say you have a particle with uncertainty to it. Maybe it's here, maybe it's there, maybe it's in this third location you don't know. The universe says, that's cool. The particle can be uncertain, all right, But then what is the gravity of an uncertain particle. Does it have a little bit of curvature over here because it might be over there, and a little bit of curvature over there because it might be over there. Is the curvature of space itself uncertain? We don't know how to unify these two ideas, the quantum mechanics and of gravity. Nobody really knows how that can be done.
That's so interesting and uncomfortable from a sort of biology perspective because when you look at biology, big stuff is made out of small stuff, and so that tracks. But when you look at biological processes, like you look at a cell, and it's interesting because of course, on a certain level, each cell's activity does not necessarily explain everything about a human being or a cat or a dog their behavior. But you can generally track how the small stuff creates the big stuff, and there's generally some like the rules that govern the small stuff, these biological processes that govern the small stuff. You can track how that is impacting the big stuff. Like you chug a bunch of soy sauce, and those salt ions are you know, messing up your ion channels in your brain, and then that's why you're in a coma. So it's you know, it's very uncomfortable this idea that you couldn't track, like, okay, so this proton is acting in a certain way, and then we can scale up to you know, an item like a watermelon, because it has a bunch of protons in it, we know how that the behavior of those protons would somehow affect the behavior of the water melon exactly.
And we'd love to do an experiment where we could study that right, where we could take something where quantum mechanics was relevant and also gravity was relevant, Like if we could take enough protons and squeeze them together and keep them in a small enough space so there's still being quantum mechanical, but we had enough protons where we could also measure its gravity. That way we could understand, like how the small stuff is affecting the big stuff. So in order to keep the quantum mechanical effects relevant, you got to keep it like really really small. And so what happens when you try to do that, when you add enough stuff together so that it stays quantum mechanical and gravity starts to get relevant, You get a black hole. That's what a black hole is is a huge amount of mass in a tiny little space. And so on one hand, that's exciting, Wow, the answer is inside a black hole. On the other hand, all that's really frustrating. The answer is, hi, inside a black hole, we can't see it. We think that probably inside a black hole is evidence that would point us in the direction of how to bring these two theories together, how to explain what happens when you have a bunch of quantum stuff that has enough gravity that you can't ignore it anymore.
It feels like a sick joke, right to put all the answers inside a thing that we can't see inside. And if we tried to get someone in there, it would destroy.
Them exactly, And they might actually survive going inside the black hole and seeing the answer, But then they could never tell us, so they couldn't even come collect their Nobel prize. We'd have to send in the Nobel Prize after them, assuming that they'd figured it out.
Like I feel like, if someone dives into a black hole, they just deserve a Nobel Prize, whether they discover anything or not. But we can study black holes, we just can't like see inside them. So is there any way to study a black hole such that it gives Is this any clues about this?
Well, there is one possible crack in the veneer of black holes, which is their hawking radiation. Black holes are not totally black. They do emit some radiation. It's even talking to the calculation a few decades ago, and he didn't have a theory for what is the gravity of particles but he did some sort of like clever handwavey approximations, and he showed that if you have a quantum field near something with an event horizon, then there has to be radiation leaving the event horizon. So now we interpret this as like the black hole is evaporating, it's like giving up some of its energy. The idea is that maybe in that radiation, maybe as particles are being generated by the event horizon, there might be clues as to what's inside the black hole. It's sort of very speculative, cutting edge research, but it's possible that if we did see hawking radiation, we could maybe infer from it something about what's inside the black hole. But hawking radiation would be very very faint, and black holes are very very far away and hidden by all sorts of other very noisy stuff like hot gases emitting all sorts of radiation. So we've never seen hawking radiation, and frankly, we don't seem very likely to anytime in the near future. So until then, the only frontier really is mental. Can we come up with a new theory that brings these two things together, that reconciles the uncertainty of quantum mechanics and the determinism of relativity.
Well, give me like three minutes while ads play, and I'll try to come up with something.
All right, The Katie Golden tries to win the Nobel Prize in three minutes challenge.
Go Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads.
We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds.
More because the more we.
Know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents, are you looking for a screen free, engaging way to teach your kids the Bible, one that's easy to understand and enjoyable for multiple ages. Kids Bible Stories Podcast is here to help. I created this for my own children and it's now a favorite among thousands of families. Kids love the vivid imagery, scriptures and sound effects. Will parents appreciate the apply section for meaningful conversations. We have hundreds and hundreds of beautiful episodes that bring the Bible to life when you simply press play. It's a sound and practical resource that walks alongside you as you teach your kids. We want kids to see how incredible God's word is in an engaging and memorable way with Kids Bible Stories Podcast. Listen to Kids Bible Stories Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey everyone, this is Jimmy O'Brien from John Boy Media. I want to quickly tell you about my podcast. It's called Jimmy's Three Things. Episodes come out every Tuesday and for about thirty minutes, I dive into three topics in Major League Baseball that I am interested in breaking stories, trends, stats, weird stuff. Sometimes I make up my own stats. Sometimes I do a lot of research and it ends up I was wrong the whole time. So that's something you can get in on. Use Jimmy's Three Things podcast to up to date on Major League Baseball and to make you just a smidge smarter than your friend who's a baseball fan. You listen to me and then you go tell him, Hey, I know this and you don't. So I make you smarter than your friends. That's what Jimmy's Three Things is all about. Listen to Jimmy's Three Things on iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You could also find it on the Talking Baseball YouTube channel, and new episodes drop every Tuesday.
We think of Franklin is the doddling dude flying a kite in the rain, But those twoermens are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm evan RIGHTLFF.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America.
I mean he was never early to bed and early to rise type person.
He's enormously famous. Women shut wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and once Washington had do it.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, I think I've got it, Daniel.
Oh wow, I'm so desperate to hear what you came up with.
Did you guys remember to carry the.
One hold on a second? Did we miss a minus signum? Is that the whole problem? Oh my gosh, Katie, pause this recording right now to rush off to Sweden to collecting a price.
Well you're very welcome, but yes, let's talk about the how to go from like our observational science to bringing it into the brain. How could we possibly do science from inside our own heads?
Well, sometimes it comes down to just being creative. You know a lot of big advances in human history have come from just people sitting in their dank study thinking about the nature of the universe and pulling ideas together. You know, Einstein's revolution with a photoelectric effect. He didn't do that experiment. He didn't have a piece of metal and a bright light in his laboratory. Guy didn't have a laboratory. He read a paper or somebody else did this experiment, and he just thought about it and had this idea for how to explain it, and combined it with something he heard from Max Plank about how to explain how stuff glows and the temperature at which things glow, And decades earlier, Maxwell brought together electricity and magnetism just by writing them down nicely on a sheet of paper and noticing that there were symmetries between them. So we can make a lot a lot of progress in physics just by having new ideas.
So are there people in dank rooms. I imagine them with like maybe one light bulb lighting the entire room, hard at work trying to figure this out. Has there been any progress made on trying to come up with a philosophical or mathematical explanation.
So people have been working on this for a long time and it's very challenging mathematically. It's hard to see how you can get this sort of uncertainty of quantum mechanics and the rigor and determination of general relativity to play nicely together. There's been a lot of attempts, and a lot of them have failed. But there is a new idea out there, and that's quantum relativity what we're talking about today, And the idea is instead of taking general relativity and trying to change it so that it's like uncertain, rather than saying, maybe the curvature of space time is uncertain in the way we're talking about earlier, it's wondering can we actually see how quantum mechanics comes naturally from relativeivity, Like maybe the weirdness of quantum mechanics just emerges from relativity itself, the way the ideal gas law emerges from the motion of particles, or hurricanes emerge from the swirling of droplets in the atmosphere. Is it possible to find hints in relativity from which we could build the weirdness of quantum mechanics directly. That's why it's called quantum relativity. Take relativity and find a way to build quantum mechanics on top of it, rather than like jamming quantum uncertainty directly into relativity.
That's interesting because I think of when I think of sort of the direction of causality, I think of, like the small things cause the big things to happen, right, the little particles. There's some causality of like the small particles that make up the big things, you know, cause some effect, so that I would always kind of intuitively think like, well, we have to figure out how the small things behavior explains the big things. But it seems like this is more like you're taking the kind of behavior of big things with general relativity and seeing how that could either explain or how you could see quantum mechanics grow out of that.
Yeah, exactly, And so let's drill in on some of the details to make this a little bit more concrete.
You know.
One of the crucial things we have in quantum mechanics that we don't have in relativity is this uncertainty, this possibility for things to be in two locations. Right, a particle, for example, we say maybe it does this, and maybe it does that, and we said that's uncertain. It has both possibilities, whereas in relativity we have a lot of determination. Like you shoot a particle, even if it's near the speed of light, it's going in some direction, you know what it's going to do. You can calculate it. One of the core conflicts between these two theories is just that. So the authors of this theory quantum relativity have found a way to try to find multiple possibilities in relativity. They say, hmm, maybe there's some overlooked mathematics that shows us how relativity actually can have like multiple solutions simultaneously. One of the founding principles of relativity is that light always moves at the speed of light. Right, all observers see light moving at the speed of light, no matter how fast you're going. So you're moving in half the speed of light relative to the Earth. You turn on a flashlight, you're going to see that light beam moving at the speed of light relative to you. Somebody on the ground who sees you moving at half the speed of light and turning on your flashlight, they look at that lightbeam, they also see it moving at the speed of light. They don't see it moving at the speed of light plus half the speed of light. It's one of the really weird things about special relativity.
Right, so light there is a constant speed of light that can't really be slowed down or sped up exactly.
And this is the founding assumption of special relativity, at least to a whole bunch of mathematics that tells us how to see things from different perspectives. Tells us like, how is it possible to see light moving this speed for this observer and seeing it moved at the same speed for that observer. It helps us tie it all together, tells a different story for how the universe works, and time goes weird sometimes and things get short, and we have podcasts digging into all those details. But it gives us this picture of like how different people can see the universe from different velocities. And this is called the Lorentz transforms. It tells you how to transform between one observer and another observer. Because it turns out to be not as simple as we thought.
Yeah, I'm looking at this formula and doesn't look super simple to me.
No, it's not simple, and it's nonlinear, and it's got square roots in it, and it gets really wonky, which is why relativity is so weird and time flows strangely, and you have the twin paradox and all that stuff. Now that's fine, but it turns out there's actually a second solution. There's another way you could describe the transformation how people see things in different velocities. That also satisfies this requirement that the speed of light is the same for everybody, sort of like a second solution to an equation. You know, if you have like X squared equals nine, one solution is, oh, X equals three. Another solution is what if X equals minus three. This is the kind of thing that crops up all the time in mathematics and sometimes in physics. We be like, well minus three doesn't make sense. We'll just ignore that. We'll just drop the unphysical solution.
Yeah, you can't have negative three apples, missus Birch.
You can actually go into debt for apples and you can be apple det or prison. So yeah, thanks financial engineers for inventing negative money.
I forgot that our currency was based on the Apple standard.
Exactly. So in this scenario, there's one solution to these transformations to tell you, like how different observers see the universe different velocities, and that's the one that assumes that everything travels at the speed of light or less. It's actually a second solution, a second way to transformed between these frames that holds four velocities greater than the speed of light. And that's like, what hold on a second, I thought the whole assumption of special relativity was that you can own only move slower than the speed of light, right, that is one way to interpret these transformations. There's another way to interpret them for velocities greater than the speed of light, So these would mean particles moving faster than the speed of light.
What kind of particles are these? Do we know?
So there's a theory about particles moving faster than the speed of light. They're called a tachions, and they do satisfy the mathematics of relativity, though nobody's ever seen one. One problem with anything moving faster than the speed of light is that you can end up with tricky paradoxes about the order of things and causality, because remember that observers moving at high speeds can see stuff happening at different times, Like if I see event A happening before event B, you might see the opposite order of stuff because you're flying by me at a high speed. That's one of the consequences of special relativity that you're not guaranteed simultaneity for all frames. That different observers can see the order of events differently, and that's usually fine, it's not a big deal. But if you can move faster than the speed of light, then you start to see things that are causally linked be reversed. Like, for example, if I fire an arrow, then somebody moving past me is faster than the speed of light could see the arrow hit the apple before I even fire it. That seems sort of problematic, and people are like, yeah, let's just cross that off and say that doesn't happen, but actually opens the door and exactly the way we might need to link relativity with quantum mechanics, because now we have like two explanations for those events, like does Daniel fire the arrow before it hits the apple or does it hit the apple before I fire the arrow. So the idea of quantum relativity is to say, well, what if you look at these things both from the less than the speed of light perspective and the greater than the speed of light perspective, Like if you allow both views of it, then you have sort of like two different ideas for what might be happening here, and there isn't a deterministic explanation for which is the right one.
I mean, you had mentioned earlier that this was kind of right because like the idea is that you can't observe causally linked events in reverse. What is the assumption behind that that says that you can't do that, Because like, I know, it sounds obvious, right, like, of course you can't. I would assume there's actually some kind of law in physics that does link to that, because you know what we know about like assumptions, Like we have all sorts of assumptions about the world works because that's how we observe it. We as humans never observe things in reverse. But is there an actual law in either physics or general relativity that would prohibit that observation from coming before the event?
Yeah, that's a great question. Why do we assume that there's causality in the universe that things have to be linked? And it's just sort of like part of how we think about physics. It's a core assumption we make. We don't know that it's true, but it sort of makes sense to us, and so we try to hold on to it as long as possible, build theories on that assumption and see if they work. But it might be that we have to give it up. There are other hints and other theories of physics, sort of the cutting edge that maybe causality isn't the fundamental aspect of the universe. It might be something we are trying to impose on it. You know, think about the way that we explain the universe. We tend to tell stories. Stories are like little causal links. I did this, and then she did that, and then this happened. It's like A, then B, and then C then D. It's sort of embedded deeply into how we think. It doesn't mean it has to be embedded deeply into the universe. And so this is sort of like giving up that causal chain and saying, well, maybe A cause B, but maybe B caused A. And that's where you get your crack in determinism in relativity, it says, maybe there are two ways to view these events, one subliminal, sorry, one subluminal not subliminals in slower than the speed of.
Life about the superliminal messaging.
Yeah, and one super illuminal like a view from an observer moving fast than the speed of light. It sees an opposite order of events. And this is basically the crack that this whole theory of quantum relativity is built on. It says, within relativity, maybe you can have nondeterminism because maybe the superluminal view of the universe is different from the subluminal view, that the order of events can be different from within relativity, we now see a little bit of uncertainty, a loss of determinism, and that's basically the starting place for quantum relativity.
I think we have to remind ourselves that physicists are human beings and they have the same kind of mental fallacies, or not necessarily fallacies, but just habits the routine that all humans have, which is viewing things in terms of what we have adapted to as human beings or earlier as primates. And it's such a strong thing. There have been studies on people's behavior where when you look at like a screen that has like randomly moving dots on a screen or something like, people will try to impose some kind of like rules on this or like volition to these things, like that these feel alive because they're moving randomly, and so you think, well, then there must be some kind of autonomy of these things, like some reason that it's doing is so like this causality link like I mentioned earlier, It's even found in like babies, where you'll see like if they see something that defies the laws of very simple physics of like a ball hitting a ball and that ball kind of moving, they stare at that because that's not what they're expecting. So it seems like a huge challenge to overcome our humanness when we're also trying to answer these questions about the universe that do not necessarily play by the same rules as say like a primate that has some gotten smart enough to start writing down numbers.
Yeah, and we've often seen the appearance of autonomy and action in the universe, you know, explaining whether in terms of some big guy in the sky throwing thunderbolts, et cetera, et cetera. And so we do have to be careful and question our assumptions. And sometimes when we are failing to describe the universe that we see, we need to circle back and say, well, maybe there's something wrong in the foundations of our science itself. Maybe we need to be asking questions about whether all these assumptions really hold and what breaks if we get rid of them, or what breakthroughs we might be able to make.
So once we get rid of this assumption that there has to be this causality, has there been any breakthroughs in terms of then connecting this potential new model of general relativity to quantum mechanics, Like have there been successful sort of developments in quantum relativity beyond just like maybe we can issue the cause.
Not yet, it's sort of like a promising direction for people to build on. What it has generated is a whole series of papers arguing about it. So a bunch of physicians are like, hey, you can't do that. This doesn't make sense, and other people be like, no, actually, maybe it does. And so you know, it's a healthy conversation so far hasn't led anywhere concrete yet, but you know, it might be that we look back in one hundred years and tell stories about this moment where people are like, wait a second, what about this basic assumption or this could just end up on the very, very deep trash can of the theories that have attempted to unify general relativity and EQUANTM mechanics and failed.
I mean, you need to fill a few trash cans full of crumpled up sheets to make a physics aline as I understand it.
Exactly.
But it's fun to examine all these assumptions to try to explain our universe in terms of the tiniest little particles, and to try to unify those theories, the ones that describe the really big, heavy stuff and the ones that describe the tiniest little particles flitting around inside our atoms. Maybe one day we'll figure it out. Until then, thanks very much Katie for joining me on this journey to our lack of understanding about the universe.
Thanks for having me, and really do check on whether you guys just forgot to carry the one, because you know, we all make mistakes.
I'm on it, and if it turns out you were right, we'll definitely cite you. Thanks everyone for listening, See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media, where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Disport, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese in 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 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.
Hi everyone, it's me Katie Couric. You know, if you've been following me on social media, you know I love to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen, Lighty Hoik, Alison Roman, and Ininagarten. So I started a free newsletter called good Taste to share recipes, tips, and kitchen mustaves. Just sign up at Katiecurrek dot com slash good Taste. That's k A T I E c o U r ic dot com slash good Taste. I promise your taste buds will be happy you did.
Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I'm a neuroscientists at.
Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life. Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
