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Speaker 2: Doctor Leue, what would you say about artificial intelligence? Is
Speaker 2: it dangerous or beneficial or both?
Speaker 3: Well, George, I think it's both. I mean, let's think
Speaker 3: about this in your life. Do you know intelligent people
Speaker 3: that are both harmful and helpful to you?
Speaker 2: I would probably say in deep thought.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah. And so if we think about it that way,
Speaker 3: it's a tool like anything else, right, whether fossil fuels,
Speaker 3: for example, they're great, they have done tremendous good to
Speaker 3: our society, but we also see that there is some
Speaker 3: harm if you use them unwisely, and if you want,
Speaker 3: you can even make bombs out of it, which would
Speaker 3: be terrible. But it really varies on how you use it.
Speaker 3: And so right now, a lot of my artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: colleagues are saying, be careful when we build some thing
Speaker 3: that is AI based that can work faster than our
Speaker 3: human minds can, Let's be sure that we set it
Speaker 3: on the right path before we let it go without
Speaker 3: any restriction.
Speaker 2: Explain Charles Schrodinger's cat.
Speaker 3: Okay, Schrodinger's Cat is one of the great stories of
Speaker 3: quantum physics and it's history. It probably is the best
Speaker 3: known sort of thought experiment about quantum physics and this
Speaker 3: concept called quantum entanglement. Imagine if this is what Erwin
Speaker 3: Schrodeger said to Albert Einstein back in nineteen thirty something.
Speaker 3: Imagine if there were a cat in a box, and
Speaker 3: this is an air tight box, and inside that box
Speaker 3: there's a capsule of poison, and that poison will be
Speaker 3: released only if a certain atomic effect happens, like one
Speaker 3: atomic decay or something like that. Now, physicists can predict
Speaker 3: when a lot of atomic decays can happen on average,
Speaker 3: how long it would take. That's called a half life.
Speaker 3: But in any given particle, we cannot know whether or
Speaker 3: not this thing is going to decay today or tomorrow
Speaker 3: or in a few seconds. So what Schurgeger said was,
Speaker 3: if you put this cat in this box and you
Speaker 3: don't open the box, you don't know whether or not
Speaker 3: that atomic decay occurred, and therefore you don't know whether
Speaker 3: that cat has been poisoned or not. Is that cat
Speaker 3: dead or alive? You can't tell until you open the box.
Speaker 3: Before the box is opened, the cat could be alive
Speaker 3: or it could be dead. Mathematically, it could even be
Speaker 3: alive and dead at the same time. Sixty percent alive,
Speaker 3: forty percent dead. Who knows. And this is the thought
Speaker 3: process that Schurteger presented to Einstein and to others to say,
Speaker 3: this is how quantum physics is fundamentally different from classical physics.
Speaker 2: Why is physics so fascinating.
Speaker 3: Terms because it really provides an insight to everything around us. Originally,
Speaker 3: right when physics was first being thought about, guys like Aristotle,
Speaker 3: right the ancient Greeks are trying to figure out why
Speaker 3: things move, why things fall, and they came up with ideas,
Speaker 3: but they didn't know how to really explore those ideas.
Speaker 3: They sounded good, but they didn't know how to test them.
Speaker 3: And then it took a thousand plus years before people
Speaker 3: whom we call scientists today in the Arab world, in
Speaker 3: the European world, in the Asian world. Galileo Galilei, well
Speaker 3: known guy from the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundred in Italy,
Speaker 3: was really the one who wrote down sort of this
Speaker 3: is how I am studying the universe, not just thinking
Speaker 3: about it, but exploring it by experimentation and by testing
Speaker 3: it and figuring out whether something not necessarily is right,
Speaker 3: but whether it's wrong and so over time. I think
Speaker 3: physics fascination is that it gives us a chance to
Speaker 3: test things, not just guess at things, but really help
Speaker 3: us know what's there. And once you test them and
Speaker 3: figure out what's not right, you can slowly reveal what's right.
Speaker 3: And from there we can build on that and work
Speaker 3: further and further till today we can use quantum physics
Speaker 3: to make things like computers and cell phones, and use
Speaker 3: general relativity to make GPS systems and things like that.
Speaker 3: That's really pretty cool.
Speaker 2: I always qualify this statement by saying, if you can
Speaker 2: take God out of the equation for a moment, how
Speaker 2: did this universe get to be so magnificent in the
Speaker 2: form that it is. I mean, it's truly remarkable.
Speaker 3: It is, and it's so remarkable it exceeds our human
Speaker 3: ability to understand it so far. Right, The reason we
Speaker 3: keep making so many discoveries in physics today and in
Speaker 3: astronomy and talking about the origins of the universe and
Speaker 3: so forth, is indeed that it's so much more complicated
Speaker 3: than us because we were built inside it. Right, If
Speaker 3: you take the basic laws of physics, as we understand
Speaker 3: them right now, and just add all the matter and
Speaker 3: the energy that we have in the universe and give
Speaker 3: it space and give it time. Then it organizes itself
Speaker 3: just in ways that we can't even begin to imagine,
Speaker 3: the ways that we have been able to imagine already
Speaker 3: explain amazing things like the Earth, the Sun, our galaxy, life,
Speaker 3: we humans, and then there's still more to discover every
Speaker 3: time because of the strategy of looking at things that
Speaker 3: we can show are wrong, testing our hypotheses and ideas,
Speaker 3: and then we can slowly figure out what's right by
Speaker 3: proving that thing is wrong. That's really I think why
Speaker 3: it's so cool. It's just the amount of time that
Speaker 3: we've had to allow all these things to organize, and
Speaker 3: that complexity has led to all these amazing things.
Speaker 2: Do you think do you believe there's an intelligence behind it?
Speaker 3: There is no evidence. People have looked really hard to
Speaker 3: see if an intelligence is necessary to do this, and
Speaker 3: it turns out that at the moment, despite looking for it,
Speaker 3: there is no concrete need for that intelligence behind it
Speaker 3: for all this stuff to happen. We used to think
Speaker 3: that it had to, but as we go further, we
Speaker 3: see that those unknown things that we thought, oh, surely
Speaker 3: must have been the hand of some divine or some superintelligence.
Speaker 3: Turns out that it just happens naturally, and it can
Speaker 3: happen naturally. This has been a question from a law
Speaker 3: a long time ago. It was a very famous quote.
Speaker 3: I don't know if this story is apocryphal or real,
Speaker 3: but Napoleon once asked his favorite scientist, a guy named Lejandre, said, uh,
Speaker 3: do you think there is a god? And he said
Speaker 3: Legendre said, as of this moment, I have as yet
Speaker 3: no need for that hypothesis. Interesting take, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: And there's no thing that says that an super intelligent
Speaker 3: creature or a god, or many gods for that matter,
Speaker 3: does not exist. Right, We just haven't been able to
Speaker 3: show that it's necessary.
Speaker 2: How did it start?
Speaker 3: How did all the whole universe start?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, therein lies a fascinating question too. We can figure
Speaker 3: out by going backwards in time from our current universe
Speaker 3: and the way that it has developed, that at about
Speaker 3: thirteen point eight billion years ago years as measured by
Speaker 3: a total number of seconds, right, not by the number
Speaker 3: of times Earth has gone around the Sun, because the
Speaker 3: Earth hasn't been around that long right, If you count
Speaker 3: backwards thirteen point eight billion years ago, our universe should
Speaker 3: have been far smaller than any subatomic particle that exists today.
Speaker 3: We're talking a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of.
Speaker 2: An inch, smaller than microscopic.
Speaker 3: That's right, far smaller than any mine.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so how it got from that point to
Speaker 3: our present day. We have a pretty good sense based
Speaker 3: on the physics that we've been able to understand up
Speaker 3: to this point, the astronomical observations, the theoretical work that
Speaker 3: we've been working on. That that's pretty good. But below that,
Speaker 3: how it got to that point in the first place
Speaker 3: is the subject of a lot of controversy, in part
Speaker 3: because we can't design an experiment yet to prove that
Speaker 3: our idea is wrong.
Speaker 2: We can't duplicate it.
Speaker 3: Nuts, right, it's only happened once before. The cool thing
Speaker 3: about we can't duplicate it, George, what you mentioned is
Speaker 3: that one of the hypotheses about how the universe got
Speaker 3: to the way it was involves a kind of expansion
Speaker 3: of the universe that happened after it first began to exist.
Speaker 3: There's this thing called inflation, all right, Not inflation like
Speaker 3: economic inflation, but inflation, like space gets blown upward like
Speaker 3: a balloon, it balloons outward and a huge, massively fast
Speaker 3: expansion doesn't pop, but it just grows so fast that
Speaker 3: all future expansion depends on how that inflation happened. So
Speaker 3: the thing is, if that kind of inflation is true,
Speaker 3: then there's nothing that stops it from happening again and
Speaker 3: again and again, but just in an environment and in
Speaker 3: a way that we can't detect. So if inflation happens,
Speaker 3: there is this hypothesis that there's this thing called eternal
Speaker 3: inflation where a nearly infinite are certainly a huge number
Speaker 3: of these universal bubbles can pop up and we could
Speaker 3: just be existing in one of them, while there are
Speaker 3: a multitude of such inflationary bubbles all around us and
Speaker 3: we can't interact with them.
Speaker 2: Do we know why a jump started, though.
Speaker 3: That's something we don't know yet. The current hypotheses vary widely,
Speaker 3: and again the problem is that they can work out
Speaker 3: the math. My colleagues who are doing this sort of
Speaker 3: theoretical cosmology stuff, but there's no experiment yet that can
Speaker 3: show that their math is wrong or right. One really
Speaker 3: promising idea, which I think is kind of cool is
Speaker 3: to imagine that our space time, our universe here, which
Speaker 3: has the dimensions of length with height and time time,
Speaker 3: is actually like a four dimensional projection of something that's
Speaker 3: a five dimensional shape or structure. Okay, have you ever
Speaker 3: played with soap bubbles and like taken two bubbles and
Speaker 3: pushed them close together, and then they kind of combine
Speaker 3: and they form a little skin between the two of them.
Speaker 2: Not many years, yeah, one though, Yeah right?
Speaker 3: It actually physics teaching physics in part gives me excuse
Speaker 3: to play with bubble bath the way that I used
Speaker 3: to when I was a kid. Right, you can imagine
Speaker 3: taking three dimensional bubbles and making them come in contact
Speaker 3: with each other, and then they create a two dimensional
Speaker 3: skin in between them. Right. That skin lasts for a
Speaker 3: period of time, depending on how long the bubbles last,
Speaker 3: and they form the skin when they come in contact. Now,
Speaker 3: imagine if two five dimensional structures they're currently called membranes,
Speaker 3: if they come in contact, then they would create a
Speaker 3: skin between them. But instead of going from three to
Speaker 3: two dimensions as in the soap bubble analogy, it would
Speaker 3: go from five to four dimensions. And so our four
Speaker 3: dimensional space time may be the consequence of the contact
Speaker 3: between two five dimensional membranes, and when that happened, that
Speaker 3: was when the universe, as we understand that this four
Speaker 3: dimensional space time first began to exist. We just don't
Speaker 3: have the experiments or the observations yet that can prove
Speaker 3: or disprove this mathematically really interesting hypothesis.
Speaker 2: What is the possibility that we may be living in
Speaker 2: a holographic universe?
Speaker 3: Ah, A holographic universe, for all intents and purposes, is
Speaker 3: an idea that suggests that we see three dimensions and
Speaker 3: observe three dimensions, but all of our information is preserved
Speaker 3: in two dimensions. It's kind of like the holograms on
Speaker 3: our debit cards, right, even though they're flat, it looks
Speaker 3: like there is a three dimensional object in there because
Speaker 3: the information for the three dimensional object is preserved in
Speaker 3: two dimensions. So could we be in a holographic universe? Possibly?
Speaker 3: We have to try to prove or disprove that though,
Speaker 3: and that's the problem. We can't design an experiment yet
Speaker 3: that allows us to understand whether or not we are
Speaker 3: all projected on say two dimensional space that has time,
Speaker 3: But we think we're in a three dimensional space because
Speaker 3: that's what we see, or the other way around. We
Speaker 3: are two dimensional or projected on the three, or four
Speaker 3: dimensionals projected on the three. These kinds of projection ideas
Speaker 3: could work and mathematically, but we don't have experiments that
Speaker 3: can confirm them yet.
Speaker 2: This is dramatic stuff. Charles is that it's a lot
Speaker 2: of fun.
Speaker 3: I really like thinking about them and telling this with people.
Speaker 3: It's fun stuff.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the title of your book, The Handy
Speaker 2: Quantum Physics answer Book.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, you see, I use quantum physics in my
Speaker 3: research all the time. I'm an astronomer, right, Like I
Speaker 3: said earlier. I study galaxies when they're crashing into each other.
Speaker 3: I study the super massive black holes that are inside them.
Speaker 3: I study the star formation history of the universe, things
Speaker 3: like that. So I use quantum physics every day, but
Speaker 3: I don't actually conduct research in the debts and the
Speaker 3: details of quantum physics. Right. So I wanted to show
Speaker 3: everybody who wanted to be curious about it what quantum
Speaker 3: physics specifically is like on a regular basis. You know,
Speaker 3: you look for handy books or handy guides to things
Speaker 3: when you want to know stuff that's cool, but you
Speaker 3: don't need necessarily to get into the weeds right. And
Speaker 3: so that's what the Handy Quantum Physics answer Book is
Speaker 3: a out. You want to know a little bit about quantum,
Speaker 3: you want to know a lot about quantum. Here it is.
Speaker 3: But it's not written in a way that's for the
Speaker 3: technical people or for the researchers. It's for you and me.
Speaker 3: We're just taking all the cool ideas and concepts that
Speaker 3: have been expressed through mathematics and through physical research and
Speaker 3: just giving it for all of us to be able
Speaker 3: to use and to enjoy.
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