Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2: Our colleague Noel is on a big adventure, but will
Speaker 2: be returning shortly.
Speaker 3: They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
Speaker 3: they don't want you to know. Let's get physical physical
Speaker 3: Remember that song I do?
Speaker 2: Unfortunately I remember this song.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's not exactly you know, Politzer or Nobel Prize material.
Speaker 3: But Matt, this evening, you and Dylan and I are
Speaker 3: getting into physical ideas in a literal and oddly enough
Speaker 3: abstract sense. This is going to be a kind of
Speaker 3: loose exploration and conversation with us and with our fellow listeners,
Speaker 3: because we're going to the very first science, a subject
Speaker 3: that has thoroughly baffled humanity since antiquity, the study of
Speaker 3: what we call physics. Did did you take many physics
Speaker 3: classes in your school days?
Speaker 2: It took me a couple physics. Yeah, I did that
Speaker 2: mostly in the college sphere, but you know a little
Speaker 2: bit in high school. Physics are very interesting because it's
Speaker 2: really one of the most basic sciences, yet it seems
Speaker 2: to or it feels as though, at least from my perspective,
Speaker 2: to be one of the most difficult to fully grasp.
Speaker 3: Yeah, agreed. Right, we're coming to you as a collection
Speaker 3: of nerds from the alma matter how stuff works.
Speaker 2: So in Georgia State University just stayed.
Speaker 3: And Georgia Tech and all the hits, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Tech's a little different. That's probably a little better in
Speaker 2: a physics course. No offense Georgia State.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I don't know the professors at Georgia Tech.
Speaker 3: You know this, and we know some of those professors.
Speaker 3: They pride themselves on being pretty brutal, especially for those
Speaker 3: poor first year students in STEM. They are you know,
Speaker 3: I didn't go there for STEM. I went there for
Speaker 3: International Affairs, but they they pride themselves on like failing
Speaker 3: a certain number of students per course.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I have several friends who were so excited
Speaker 2: to be at Georgia Tech. They're like, oh man, we
Speaker 2: made it, got those good grades. Got into Georgia Tech.
Speaker 2: Holy crap this first year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sad like the second year students in engineering,
Speaker 3: mathematics and physics. They look like they've been in a war.
Speaker 3: They've got that seven league stare, you know, the haunted
Speaker 3: sunken eyes and yeah, anyway, shout out to Walkee Mount Pizza.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, strap in everybody, because you've got over in
Speaker 2: this corner. A fine arts degree in video and film
Speaker 2: production slash journalism and in international affairs student and oh
Speaker 2: even Tennessee Palell. He says physics classes were the bulk
Speaker 2: of his fine arts degree.
Speaker 3: Yes, good to know. We are we are as always
Speaker 3: unlike the nature of reality. We seek to be transparent
Speaker 3: and understandable, like the snark there. So we're going to
Speaker 3: go in several directions in tonight's exploration at varying velocities.
Speaker 3: We by no means as you can tell, folks are
Speaker 3: physics professors. But even you know, Matt, even from a
Speaker 3: lay perspective, it's astonishing to note just how much strange
Speaker 3: stuff is come from this ancient discipline recently. So Tonight's
Speaker 3: question that we were talking about at length off air
Speaker 3: over the past few months could civilization be close to
Speaker 3: breaking physics, as in, will new discoveries soon fundamentally rock
Speaker 3: our understanding of this crucial science?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What happens if the math doesn't work out for
Speaker 2: some reason? We base everything and whether or not the
Speaker 2: math works right with the equation? Okay, is that? Does
Speaker 2: it function in that way? What if that part doesn't matter?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Why is there so much emphasis put on the observable
Speaker 3: part of observable universe? And what happens when we start
Speaker 3: observing things we simply could not observe previously? Here are
Speaker 3: the facts all right? Well, as we always do, we
Speaker 3: decided that it is important to understand what physics is
Speaker 3: for all of our fellow non physics professors in the crowd.
Speaker 3: We got to answer that question before we get into
Speaker 3: the nerdy controversies and conspiracies surrounding physics today. I mean, look,
Speaker 3: the basic story of physics is amazing, dude. How it
Speaker 3: is a discipline today, a field of study, What it is?
Speaker 3: How it came to be? I think we got really
Speaker 3: close right there at the top, But let's just spell
Speaker 3: it out for everybody. What is physics?
Speaker 2: Okay? So you are a form of consciousness hearing this.
Speaker 2: You're inside what we call a body, probably hopefully, and
Speaker 2: that body interacts with stuff that's outside of the body
Speaker 2: and everything that you can interact with, and everything your
Speaker 2: body is, and all like, all the way up to
Speaker 2: the largest things, all the way down to the tiniest components.
Speaker 2: Physics is the study of how all of that stuff
Speaker 2: works together to give you this experience that we call consciousness.
Speaker 2: Is that a way to put it in?
Speaker 3: I like that. I think you've got some poetry to
Speaker 3: that one, Matt, because it's a We call it the
Speaker 3: first science, and that is also quetic, but it is
Speaker 3: not hyperbole. It's just what you described there, the structure
Speaker 3: of matter, the interactions between the fundamental components of again
Speaker 3: the observable universe. So as you were saying, everything from
Speaker 3: the mighty macrocosmic movements of galaxies and the heavens to
Speaker 3: the activity at the tiny, tiny, tiny sub microscopic levels
Speaker 3: all the way down to quarks itself. For etymology, Fans
Speaker 3: in the crowd comes from Latin physica, which just means
Speaker 3: study of nature, simple enough. That comes from a Greek
Speaker 3: word thusik natural science, and that comes from another Greek word,
Speaker 3: theusis meaning origin, nature, property. In this sense, physics is
Speaker 3: the grand attempt to learn how everything called reality works
Speaker 3: and what can be observed from it. So, no, biggie,
Speaker 3: you know, it's like, what are you doing this weekend?
Speaker 3: Just figure out physics.
Speaker 2: It really is the great work. I mean, there are
Speaker 2: different versions of the great work, but the great work
Speaker 2: is just figuring out what in the hell is going on?
Speaker 2: What is this stuff that we're moving through? And within
Speaker 2: physics you get studies of time, because ultimately that is
Speaker 2: how does this stuff, all these components, how do they
Speaker 2: work together from this moment to this moment to that
Speaker 2: moment to you know, to two hundred million years ago
Speaker 2: to a billion years from now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And what happens when linear time, one of
Speaker 3: our foundational assumptions or axioms, no longer seems the whole true?
Speaker 3: This gets nuts so quickly, all right. The goal of
Speaker 3: physics has always been to create a streamlined, consistent collection
Speaker 3: of just a few principles that apply to everything, explain
Speaker 3: all the apparent contradictions between different interactions and processes, and
Speaker 3: also to explain how those things work together to create
Speaker 3: this culmination of mechanics right that we call the universe
Speaker 3: and indeed consciousness. And to get a little ridiculous historian
Speaker 3: about this, Yeah, it's the oldest, most fundamental branch of
Speaker 3: modern science, and its origin story as a result of
Speaker 3: being so important and so baffling, the origin story is
Speaker 3: inspiring and super frustrating, mainly because civilization learns one thing
Speaker 3: and says, Okay, we got it right, thermodynamics super solid. Good,
Speaker 3: that great job, team, that's lunch. But the more new
Speaker 3: stuff we seem to learn, the more challenges arise to
Speaker 3: things that we thought were conclusively solved. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: this reminds me of our series on Weirdly enough astronomy
Speaker 3: or astrology, I should say, and governmental figures, right, because
Speaker 3: modern physics comes about because people started practicing astrology.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, and it pops up independently. I'm not
Speaker 2: kidding when I'm not trying to be weird when I
Speaker 2: say you are a point of consciousness, and everything we
Speaker 2: observe from that point of consciousness is reality. I just
Speaker 2: mean that's what every human being has experienced that is
Speaker 2: born and then can see and can hear and is
Speaker 2: just looking out and I'm looking around and you see
Speaker 2: the stuff, right, and you can figure out that that's
Speaker 2: a tree because somebody hopefully tells you it's a tree,
Speaker 2: or you named it a tree, or in whatever language
Speaker 2: you speak, right, But every one of those people also
Speaker 2: was able to look up at those times, wherever they were,
Speaker 2: whenever they were, and see the heavens and that thing,
Speaker 2: that moment of being able to observe something that is
Speaker 2: so far away or just all you can do is
Speaker 2: see it. You can't ever touch it, you can't ever
Speaker 2: smell it or use your other senses on it. You
Speaker 2: can just see it and you know it's there. I
Speaker 2: think all of humanity across the world, when they look up,
Speaker 2: they go, what is that? Why is that? And what
Speaker 2: does that mean? Right?
Speaker 3: What does it all mean? Yeah, to quote Philharmonic, what's
Speaker 3: it all mean? I used to say, and you remember this,
Speaker 3: I used to often in more nihilistic days, just note
Speaker 3: that everything, including humans, were simply objects in space. But
Speaker 3: I think it's more appropriate to say, from the standpoint
Speaker 3: of physics, it's more appropriate to say, everything and every
Speaker 3: consciousness is a series of processes existing in space. Right.
Speaker 3: You are kind of a song that you sing to yourself. Right.
Speaker 3: That gets us to the other things like we said,
Speaker 3: this is going to be loose. But that gets us
Speaker 3: to the idea of duplicating consciousness through electronic means. Could
Speaker 3: you simply emulate a pattern? If so, does that mean
Speaker 3: you could zeros a soul? Or what passes for a soul?
Speaker 3: These are deep questions, But these are also the kind
Speaker 3: of deep questions, surprisingly, that physicists will deal with because
Speaker 3: their roots come their roots arive from astrology, a natural philosophy.
Speaker 3: You know, in those early evenings that you just described,
Speaker 3: met science and spirituality were inseparable, and these were smart people.
Speaker 3: Early scholars could say, predict eclipses, the passage of the seasons.
Speaker 3: They would know about changes in the weather up there
Speaker 3: with a lot of modern meteorologists. But the difference was
Speaker 3: they were much more likely to assign divine or spiritual
Speaker 3: agency to those observations. So now it's not it's not
Speaker 3: necessarily a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse because of
Speaker 3: the passage of Earth in a heliocentric system. Instead, God
Speaker 3: is angry, right, and God told you God was going
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: Angry later certainly, absolutely all right.
Speaker 3: This whole spirituality science, it begins to change back in
Speaker 3: the sixth century BCE, as we call it now. This
Speaker 3: is where scientific thought emerges in ancient Greece, and this
Speaker 3: is where we introduce our first hero of the story.
Speaker 3: You can hear him coming, a guy named Tales of Militis,
Speaker 3: who is often cited as the first physicist ever.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this dude's awesome. This dude's super awesome. He
Speaker 2: thought that water was the basis of all matter, but
Speaker 2: I would argue he wasn't that far off. It just
Speaker 2: would be the basis of all known life. Water is certainly, yeah,
Speaker 2: the basis of all known life, but not matter. There's
Speaker 2: other stuff going on.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, and this guy, you know it is defense.
Speaker 3: He had have a microscope, right, He didn't have a
Speaker 3: particle accelerator or any of the cool new toys we
Speaker 3: have in modern evenings. But he did spend a lot
Speaker 3: of time in deep thought. And you could argue then,
Speaker 3: with that ability, he had a distinct advantage over a
Speaker 3: lot of modern society today, which does not really prize
Speaker 3: deep thought. So he gets that part wrong, But I
Speaker 3: agree with you, man, he was onto something. Another thing
Speaker 3: he and his contemporaries did. This is their real sleeper hit.
Speaker 3: They said, we're going to attempt to explain the world
Speaker 3: around us without resorting to mythology or spirituality. Sure, Zeus
Speaker 3: is the god who commands lightning, right, but what if
Speaker 3: you know, what if we could explain it without Zeus?
Speaker 3: Is he was gonna get mad? Or can we just
Speaker 3: figure out what's going on? Well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, even if it is still Zeus making the lightning,
Speaker 2: how does Zeus's lightning work? What happens here physically? An
Speaker 2: hour plane? When Zeus decides to throw some lightning, that's
Speaker 2: pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Right, because there has to be some process, right, there
Speaker 3: has to be some sort of method to the madness.
Speaker 3: In their pursuit to do this, they create a philosophical
Speaker 3: basis for rational inquiry, and the roots of this are
Speaker 3: still very much the formative basis of modern science today.
Speaker 3: They called this natural philosophy, meaning let's think about natural
Speaker 3: processes without leaning on gods and spirits as a crutch.
Speaker 3: Now this sounds very obvious, of course, in a secular
Speaker 3: modern world. But this was like a banger. This was
Speaker 3: a banger dangerous idea when it happened. And then you
Speaker 3: got folks like Pythagoras, a favorite of both of ours.
Speaker 3: Pythagoras supertomath, and he said, look, everything you see or
Speaker 3: encounter can be explained, discovered, understood via the beautiful art
Speaker 3: and science of mathematics. And then you got folks like Democritis,
Speaker 3: who speculated. He walked up. This is brilliant. This is
Speaker 3: so weird. This guy thousands of years ago walked up
Speaker 3: one day and said, you know what, I've been working
Speaker 3: with one of my teachers, and we think all matter
Speaker 3: is not necessarily made of water, no shade on a thalais.
Speaker 3: But we think all matter is composed of tiny, tiny
Speaker 3: little things. They're called atoms. They're the smallest thing. They're
Speaker 3: so small you can't see them, you can't divide them.
Speaker 3: He was wrong about that. History would show and people said, oh,
Speaker 3: ty dude, do you have any evidence for this? And
Speaker 3: he went, ah, I just I got a hunch, I
Speaker 3: got a feeling, I got a spidy sense. And people said, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's interesting. We're going to put your ideas right here
Speaker 3: on the fridge.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, it was no fridge.
Speaker 3: There was no fridge. Two thousand years later, though, atomic
Speaker 3: theory proves the the broad strokes of his philosophy to
Speaker 3: be correct, and there there are plenty of missteps along
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: A lot of the scientific shibbylists have informed Western thought
Speaker 3: for centuries and centuries, like the you know, we've all
Speaker 3: heard of this, the idea that, uh, the universe can
Speaker 3: be described as four elements earth, air, fire, water. Later
Speaker 3: someone says quintessence, right, is is a fifth state of matter,
Speaker 3: and that is the uh that is the great bull
Speaker 3: or sphere of the heavens. Uh.
Speaker 2: That's cool. That's a cool thought. It's a really cool thought.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: The just the Adams thing. We're already breaking things down
Speaker 2: as far as they can go, even though there's no microscopes,
Speaker 2: as you said, humanity is attempting to go as deep
Speaker 2: as we can, right, and we are also in this
Speaker 2: time building pieces of glass that can see further and
Speaker 2: further into space, therefore larger and larger things at the
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 3: So it is just.
Speaker 2: Really it's cool to think that humanity is exploring the
Speaker 2: concepts of above end below simultaneously, and those two different
Speaker 2: disciplines or those two different pursuits are increasing on this
Speaker 2: line that we can kind of follow. We can look
Speaker 2: at this graph as like man's ability to break down
Speaker 2: things and get deeper is not exactly simultaneously, but increasing
Speaker 2: in the same way. That is, to see larger, deeper, older.
Speaker 3: Things, absolutely expanding concurrently toward both ends of an observable spectrum,
Speaker 3: and then getting to the edge of that spectrum and
Speaker 3: asking what else is out there in that horizon or indeed,
Speaker 3: that chasm.
Speaker 2: And then the next piece of technology comes along and
Speaker 2: you do get to go a little bit further right,
Speaker 2: just a little bit, just a little.
Speaker 3: And then you look back and you realize, oh, crap, yep,
Speaker 3: the other stuff was wrong. So you know, we got
Speaker 3: to shout out so many people. We're not going to
Speaker 3: get to the mall, but let's shout out Aristotle. He's
Speaker 3: kind of the Lebron or the Michael Jordan of physics
Speaker 3: during his time. So this guy sits down, hey, looks
Speaker 3: at everybody else's ideas. They're all the ones that he
Speaker 3: can access, right, all the stuff he's read, and he's
Speaker 3: very well read for his time, and he says, let
Speaker 3: me bring all these things together. Let's make one sort
Speaker 3: of posse mixtape theory about the way the universe and
Speaker 3: reality works. He also is imperfect. He popularizes the cartoonishly
Speaker 3: incorrect idea of a geocentric heavenly system, meaning Earth is
Speaker 3: in the middle. But hey, even Michael Jordan didn't make
Speaker 3: every li up. The thing is, people respected Aristotle so
Speaker 3: so much that he got just enough right for both
Speaker 3: his correct ideas and his incorrect ideas to dominate European
Speaker 3: science and Islamic science for thousands of years after his death.
Speaker 3: At that point, the modern world does owe a lot
Speaker 3: of debt to the Islamic Golden Age, wherein Muslim scholars
Speaker 3: preserved and elaborated on Greek thought, as Europe largely languished,
Speaker 3: you know, and a lot of people have a problem
Speaker 3: with describing that era as the Dark Ages. But Europe was,
Speaker 3: you know, fallen. I was going to say falling off
Speaker 3: the horse. I don't know if that's an idiom in English.
Speaker 3: Europe has fallen behind, and some of this knowledge could
Speaker 3: have been lost to antiquity had it not been for
Speaker 3: the brilliant Muslim scholars of the Islamic Golden Age. And
Speaker 3: now we see. Physics therefore becomes this intergenerational global historic epic.
Speaker 3: It spans all races, all creeds, all cultures, all religions.
Speaker 3: There are too many luminaries for Matt and I to
Speaker 3: shout out here. I mean, just think of the scientific
Speaker 3: revolution alone, right, But we could argue this is a
Speaker 3: good thing, because it turns out it takes a lot
Speaker 3: of people working together over time to understand what we
Speaker 3: call the universe, or even to define the universe.
Speaker 2: And with all of that, years and years pass, at
Speaker 2: least as we experience them, and human beings are born
Speaker 2: and die, and born and die, born and die, and
Speaker 2: finally we arrive at the modern day, where there are
Speaker 2: scientists across the globe attempting to search for things we
Speaker 2: have yet to fully grasp, and even the things that
Speaker 2: we think we grasp, there are scientists attempting to break
Speaker 2: those systems and those thoughts so that we can move
Speaker 2: forward in maybe a different way, because just like back then,
Speaker 2: as we described in Europe, maybe our thinking is stuck
Speaker 2: in some ways or you know, went back the wrong
Speaker 2: way and we just haven't realized it yet. And that
Speaker 2: is super freaking cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I think physics is best understood as a
Speaker 3: conversation rather than a set of tablets and directives, almost
Speaker 3: a philosophy stone. Yes, very much so. Yeah, especially when
Speaker 3: you get to the edges, which we'll talk about. You
Speaker 3: know any as any hapless undergrad student can assure you
Speaker 3: and shout out, by the way to all the up
Speaker 3: and coming college students who just got their acceptance letters,
Speaker 3: congratulations and good luck. But if you are a hapless
Speaker 3: undergrad student, then you know well that physics is deceptively
Speaker 3: deep water. It starts out simple enough, right, Thermodynamics, I
Speaker 3: get it, the creation, destruction, et cetera, transformation matter, I
Speaker 3: get it. But then you turn to the next page,
Speaker 3: and this quickly becomes so complicated and like you were saying,
Speaker 3: if you go far enough into the outskirts of accepted thought,
Speaker 3: if you go out there to the bleeding edge, the
Speaker 3: ink of science that has yet to be determined, you'll
Speaker 3: hit a conceptual landscape that feels a lot less like
Speaker 3: stem and a lot more like philosophy or metaphysics. They'll
Speaker 3: readily admit this the world's greatest physicist, especially with the
Speaker 3: crazy questions they're essentially guessing. They're leveraging thousands of years
Speaker 3: of knowledge beforehand, their own deep acumen, theoretical analysis and experiments.
Speaker 3: But these guys literally make bets with each other about
Speaker 3: a possibility or a theory, and it's almost never a
Speaker 3: huge amount of money. It's like, I bet you a
Speaker 3: dollar that this is the thing about black holes, and
Speaker 3: the other guy says, all right, tally hope you know.
Speaker 2: And then nobody gets paid ever, because when will we
Speaker 2: find out about black holes? One day?
Speaker 3: Maybe? Oh gosh, hopefully in time. So this is inspiring,
Speaker 3: frustrating stuff. And here we are twenty twenty five. That's
Speaker 3: just a brief look at the origin of physics. There
Speaker 3: seems to be something new ever on the horizon, and
Speaker 3: I think a big part of that is due to
Speaker 3: technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to prove some
Speaker 3: of these guesses, models or theories. The question is, could
Speaker 3: these end up breaking the concept of traditional physics as
Speaker 3: we know it?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and we'll tell you about those in just
Speaker 2: a moment.
Speaker 3: Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So, as we know,
Speaker 3: like actually yes, so bizarre, how bizarre? How bizarre? There
Speaker 3: are different branches of study in physics. We all know
Speaker 3: that classical physics is concerned with the stuff you see
Speaker 3: every day. I pick up a I pick up a wallet,
Speaker 3: I drop the wallet. Gravity, right, and you can always
Speaker 3: encounter gravity on the planet in your day to day activities.
Speaker 3: It's kind of a Goldilocks zone of phenomenon, right, So
Speaker 3: we're dealing with speeds that are always much lower than
Speaker 3: the speed of light. We're dealing with sizes to your point,
Speaker 3: matt that are much larger than atoms, but there's still
Speaker 3: like in astronomical terms, they're T T and T tiny,
Speaker 3: and really human civilization is pretty good at understanding stuff
Speaker 3: on this level. The problem is, as you alluded to,
Speaker 3: once we get the very extreme ends of the spectrum,
Speaker 3: the very very tidy stuff, the very very big stuff,
Speaker 3: those rules are less sacro sanct They get fuzzy, they
Speaker 3: start to erode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's where you get, you know, miles and miles
Speaker 2: of a tube that's filled with magnets, and then we
Speaker 2: throw at single atoms around and accelerate them until they
Speaker 2: get crazy fast, almost the speed of light, and then
Speaker 2: smash them together and see what happens after. And then
Speaker 2: you find new particles that you didn't know existing, or
Speaker 2: sub atomic particles and stuff that goes even deeper than that.
Speaker 2: That's uh, that's when you get the black hole stuff,
Speaker 2: and you try and speculate on what does the black
Speaker 2: hole actually look like and how does it actually function?
Speaker 2: This thing that we kind of observe out there.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, this is the rise of what we call
Speaker 3: modern physics. And you have to wonder what history we'll
Speaker 3: call modern physics in the future. It's just a trick term,
Speaker 3: you know. It's like that irritating term in literature, postmodern.
Speaker 3: The heck is postmodern anyway, So.
Speaker 2: Just quantum correct, But there we go.
Speaker 3: I like that. I'm more into quantum literature. I've written
Speaker 3: all the novels at once shut out Borges. But okay,
Speaker 3: modern physics. Now we're talking high velocities, very tiny, tiny distances,
Speaker 3: very large energies. This is where you find relativity, very
Speaker 3: high energy, special relativity speeds kind of like the speed
Speaker 3: of light, and of course the infamous quantum mechanics. That's
Speaker 3: the thing, man. Despite the fact that many undergrad or
Speaker 3: high school students may feel physics is a series of
Speaker 3: commandments set in stone. As an overall concept, it is
Speaker 3: riddled with unsolved problems and what appeared to be a
Speaker 3: lot of self contradictions. You know, some existing theories. No
Speaker 3: existing theory can explain everything, right, we we can explain
Speaker 3: some observed phenomena, and we're like, okay, under this theory,
Speaker 3: this works, This makes sense. And then someone else from
Speaker 3: like across the hall in the lab goes, oh hey god,
Speaker 3: uh Matt, Matt, you gotta dude, you gotta come see
Speaker 3: these quarts, bro.
Speaker 2: What that doesn't fit with my models?
Speaker 3: We need we need new models. As they say in Vogue.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: In short, I don't know. It's weird. We know a
Speaker 3: thing does happen, and we can prove it, but we're
Speaker 3: not sure how it happens or why, and perhaps most importantly,
Speaker 3: we don't know how to square it with other related
Speaker 3: areas of inquiry. That's why you know, the Golden Goose,
Speaker 3: the Holy Grail is the idea of a theory of everything.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, and we still have that pesky little
Speaker 2: problem of we're unsure if observing something changes what happens.
Speaker 2: We still don't know if that's certain or not. Does
Speaker 2: it matter that we're observing it? Since we're observing it,
Speaker 2: is it different than it would have been if we
Speaker 2: weren't here.
Speaker 3: Like the double slit experiment. Yeah, that's a famous example.
Speaker 3: It's still a thing, oh very much so. Yeah, no
Speaker 3: one's answered that one. It's the theory of everything? Is
Speaker 3: this ancient game, right dating back to Aristotle. If we
Speaker 3: could just have one set of rules, hopefully a brief
Speaker 3: set of rules that explain how all of these seemingly
Speaker 3: contradicting things work together, work in concert to form what
Speaker 3: we observe is reality, then boom, We've won physics. Spoiler,
Speaker 3: civilization has not won physics yet. I was remembering in
Speaker 3: our research for this, I noticed an interesting pattern. Every
Speaker 3: few decades or so across the span of human history,
Speaker 3: someone comes forth, like a profit of old with their explanation,
Speaker 3: their theory of everything. There was a surfer who proposed
Speaker 3: an idea a few years ago. There have been various artists,
Speaker 3: various scientists who have done the same, but none of
Speaker 3: these ideas have been fully accepted by the scientific community
Speaker 3: at large, because it is incredibly common for someone to
Speaker 3: propose something like a reconciliation of existing theories, or a
Speaker 3: grand theory of everything, a grand unified theory, and then
Speaker 3: have some other guy come out, you know, from like
Speaker 3: across the hallway in the lab or in the academy
Speaker 3: or something, and say, yeah, but it doesn't explain this
Speaker 3: part though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, imagine what would happen if somebody truly came
Speaker 2: forth with a new theory of everything that was the
Speaker 2: real one, the actual one, and got everything right. It
Speaker 2: would disprove so many other things that we take for
Speaker 2: granted right now as being true that it would be
Speaker 2: really difficult for us to accept, and we might just
Speaker 2: throw it out immediately and we say, no, that's hogwash.
Speaker 2: But it was the right one, Like the tiny little
Speaker 2: vibrating strings I'm still.
Speaker 3: Bidding strings theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's a pretty
Speaker 3: interesting one too. Yeah. I think that's a great observation, man,
Speaker 3: because now we see that it may be inconvenient to
Speaker 3: accept a theory or a unified theory might require such
Speaker 3: a vast, comprehensive overhaul of existing accepted thought that it
Speaker 3: would feel like all the other work was for naught,
Speaker 3: you know, which is something you have to be ready
Speaker 3: for in science. Science is I can't remember if I
Speaker 3: sent this to you. There was this great stand up
Speaker 3: clip where this guy was saying, I hate when people
Speaker 3: say they don't believe in science. You know what that
Speaker 3: makes you? A scientist? Scientists are constantly skept and dissing
Speaker 3: on accepted science.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, that's the whole point.
Speaker 3: That's the whole point.
Speaker 2: Prove it to me. Oh yeah, tiny little vibrating strings
Speaker 2: show me.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. This is this a rounding error or is
Speaker 3: this the most important discovery in human history? I mean,
Speaker 3: as a result, we can say new discoveries aren't really
Speaker 3: breaking the laws of physics, and law in physics means
Speaker 3: something way different than law in regular human terms. Instead,
Speaker 3: what we find is these discoveries, which I think we'll
Speaker 3: go into in a moment, they could be more correctly
Speaker 3: said to break our own incorrect earlier assumptions about the
Speaker 3: quote unquote laws of reality, because physics, it's it's fallible,
Speaker 3: The rules aren't absolutely Okay, I was thinking of it
Speaker 3: this way. Okay, we're driving right, we're all all four
Speaker 3: of us are in the car together, you listening along
Speaker 3: at home, Thanks for going on road trip with us.
Speaker 3: We see a stop sign. A stop sign is an
Speaker 3: absolute You are driving it, you approach it, you stop.
Speaker 3: That's the law. But I would argue in this analogy,
Speaker 3: we can learn about physics because the laws of physics
Speaker 3: are much more like a bunch of extremely intelligent people
Speaker 3: saying okay, Like if the physicists are in the car,
Speaker 3: they're saying, we believe there is a stop sign here.
Speaker 3: Everything we know predicts it was probably there yesterday. We
Speaker 3: can observe that it's here now, so logically it should
Speaker 3: be here tomorrow. But then sometimes, depending on what you
Speaker 3: discover down the road, that stop sign could change to
Speaker 3: a yield sign. It could be a totally different sign
Speaker 3: that stop sign. That law could disappear entirely, like Newton's
Speaker 3: law of gravity. Still can't fully explain how the orbit
Speaker 3: of mercury works. And we've been looking at mercury forever.
Speaker 2: That's weird. I wonder I stop doing that, Mercury.
Speaker 3: Get it together, Mercury, Come on, why are you so mercurial? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Worth it keeping it? So laws have been broken, you know,
Speaker 3: we laws of physics. So Paul M. Sutter explains this
Speaker 3: beautifully in Discover magazine. He says, giving points to one
Speaker 3: of the most famous broken laws of physics, a thing
Speaker 3: called Bodes law. Bodes law was proposed back in seventeen
Speaker 3: fifteen CE, and it stated what seemed to be quite
Speaker 3: rational at the time, and said, based on what we know,
Speaker 3: each planet should be roughly twice as far away from
Speaker 3: the Sun as the next planet inwards. And this law
Speaker 3: seemed pretty it was hot stuff because it works for
Speaker 3: series C E, R, E S. And then the law
Speaker 3: predicted there should be something in the region of the
Speaker 3: asteroid belt. But the law broke down after the discovery
Speaker 3: of Neptune, so people had to throw this one sacrisanct
Speaker 3: law out with the bathwater. As of this recording, we
Speaker 3: don't know which laws of physics may stand the test
Speaker 3: of time. We don't know which ones will be broken next.
Speaker 3: We can, you know, we can give you some of
Speaker 3: the established laws that you've probably heard in school, laws
Speaker 3: of motion, relativity, universal gravitation, thermodynamics, stuff like that. But
Speaker 3: we think it's more important to talk about how humanity,
Speaker 3: almost like the myth of Icarus, sales ever closer to
Speaker 3: things that were once thought unattainable. One of the most
Speaker 3: recent examples that we've had our eyes on is, of course,
Speaker 3: the concept of nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, so Ben and I are pretty close in
Speaker 2: age when we were coming up, I want to get
Speaker 2: your opinion on this bin when you were coming up
Speaker 2: in both what I was being taught in school and
Speaker 2: what I was looking at in popular media was the
Speaker 2: concept of nuclear fission, breaking apart an atom and breaking
Speaker 2: apart atoms to create a chain reaction was very much
Speaker 2: a thing. That's how nuclear weapons work, that's how nuclear
Speaker 2: power works. Understandable, This concept of fusing atoms together and
Speaker 2: creating a chain reaction of fusing atoms was a theoretical
Speaker 2: thing that we might be able to do one day
Speaker 2: in the future. But right now it's just I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know. There's it seems almost it seems impossible
Speaker 2: at this point.
Speaker 3: Because we knew we knew it was possible for it
Speaker 3: to occur as a natural process. Yes, we did not
Speaker 3: know whether humans could jerry rig up the technology to
Speaker 3: do it on our own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how could we create an environment where that type
Speaker 2: of plasma would be formed and then be steady and
Speaker 2: you know, to be able to function and continue that
Speaker 2: reaction right at least in a chain reaction that lasts
Speaker 2: until you turn it off. Basically, Well, gosh, it was
Speaker 2: the early this year when that we I think we
Speaker 2: talked about it on Strange News or at least maybe
Speaker 2: you mentioned it at least been Yeah, the artificial sun
Speaker 2: that China's been working on out broke. It broke one
Speaker 2: thousand seconds of steady looping plasma. Hm, would you know, incredible,
Speaker 2: Like if humans can actually harness that type of power
Speaker 2: that changes everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is a fantastic example. We did mention
Speaker 3: this on Strange News, I believe briefly, but this is
Speaker 3: a fantastic example of how things that can look academic
Speaker 3: and maybe the fiscal conservatives look like a waste of time.
Speaker 3: This is a perfect example of how this does apply. Right. Physics,
Speaker 3: the theories, the models, the principles of physics, as imperfect
Speaker 3: as some may be, do give us entry into amazing
Speaker 3: technology infusion. Of course, fusion can be scary to a
Speaker 3: lot of people right for a lot of reasons. But
Speaker 3: it's important to do the cost benefit analysis. If fusion
Speaker 3: is possible, especially under a certain price point with the
Speaker 3: right constraints, then this could mean clean energy for the world,
Speaker 3: And the implications there just like the implications of an
Speaker 3: apple falling on Newton's head, right, The implications there go
Speaker 3: far beyond the initial foray into the field. So you know,
Speaker 3: I think it's also worth us noting that despite rising
Speaker 3: geopolitical tensions, which almost always hurt scientific endeavors as much
Speaker 3: as they power them, a lot of the scientists who
Speaker 3: exist in China or India or the US or Brazil
Speaker 3: or Russia wherever. Right, they are always trying to hang
Speaker 3: out with each other. I mean, yeah, they're humans, so
Speaker 3: they might have egos and stuff. But if you were
Speaker 3: a person who had spent your life researching and experimenting
Speaker 3: with something that only like twenty other people could understand,
Speaker 3: you'd want to hang out with those twenty people, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean. It's like it's like, be very
Speaker 3: into a specific genre of music, you want to hang
Speaker 3: out on that subreddit.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, or somebody who's into MTG. It's very similar. Anyway.
Speaker 2: You just want to hang out with people that understand
Speaker 2: what you understand, so you don't have to go explaining
Speaker 2: everything to everybody at all times, right, or you don't
Speaker 2: want to feel like a weirdo that wants to talk
Speaker 2: about something real specific like how much manna it costs anyway.
Speaker 3: And why some cards or tournament legal in some or not. Yes.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And we also have to remember that all of these,
Speaker 2: you know, the people who want to hang out and
Speaker 2: talk with each other, are also working for I was
Speaker 2: going to say companies in the Fourth States, it's.
Speaker 3: The MIL the military industrial legislative complex.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of. But if you look at what's happening
Speaker 2: out in Massachusetts right now. Just if we're going to
Speaker 2: take this concept of nuclear fusion as a possible game
Speaker 2: changer for how countries can operate, how the world could operate.
Speaker 2: There's a fusion reactor that's being built in Massachusetts right now.
Speaker 2: There's one out in Chesterfield County, Virginia that's being built.
Speaker 2: This concept or maybe betting on the future of what
Speaker 2: physics could achieve, happens within the state. You know, the
Speaker 2: functional countries where they are betting. They're betting on this
Speaker 2: stuff that it's going to work out, and spending tons
Speaker 2: and tons of money on it because if you do win,
Speaker 2: then your country is ahead of everybody else.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's a real shame that is not that is that
Speaker 2: it isn't more of what you're describing Ben with all
Speaker 2: the intelligent people getting together and figuring out how to
Speaker 2: do this new stuff and then everybody gets to do
Speaker 2: it so that the whole so that all ships can rise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but they don't know like that. We have to
Speaker 3: remember there the shadow of Kissinger and real politics still
Speaker 3: looms large. And quite a few, quite a few world
Speaker 3: powers who control scientific endeavors they see they see humanity
Speaker 3: as not a collaborative game of long form improv. They
Speaker 3: see it as a zero sum rush for resources, with
Speaker 3: benefit being defined as detriment to another culture, civilization, society,
Speaker 3: or player. So this style, this stymis the research. And
Speaker 3: it's really interesting too. This is not unique to the
Speaker 3: current era and the current discourse intentions. It shows us
Speaker 3: that throughout history, political machination has stymied scientific endeavors's. It
Speaker 3: would be fascinating to travel to a universe maybe one
Speaker 3: spin to the left or whatever, and see what would
Speaker 3: what twenty twenty five would be like if people had
Speaker 3: just worked together more often, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Like the space The fact that the space race happened
Speaker 3: is amazing because it kind of happened out of spite.
Speaker 3: I don't know if world governments would have paid if
Speaker 3: they saw it just as pure science. I think they felt,
Speaker 3: like Cold War style, they needed an enemy, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they also wanted to have a cool new
Speaker 2: place to shoot missiles from.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, and a cool vantage point, a new perspective
Speaker 3: for other missiles. And you know what's going on in
Speaker 3: the stands. Anyway, This gets us to this gets us
Speaker 3: to larger conversations. We said this was going to be
Speaker 3: pretty loose. Maybe we take a pause for a word
Speaker 3: from our sponsors, and we dive into some more things
Speaker 3: that allegedly break, if not laws, some assumptions about physics.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back. Okay, you might be saying, I
Speaker 3: get it. Physics is best understood as a continuing conversation. Okay, fine,
Speaker 3: very few principles are really set in stone. But come on, guys,
Speaker 3: we know some basics, right, Like, give me states of matter.
Speaker 3: At least tell me states of matter? Is you know
Speaker 3: we figured that one out. You got your gases, you
Speaker 3: got your liquids, you got your solids, you got little plasma, right.
Speaker 2: And you've got earth, air, water, and fire, well ice.
Speaker 3: Maybe. As David Neild explains writing for Science Alert, quote,
Speaker 3: states of matter describe how particles can interact with one another,
Speaker 3: giving rise to structures in various ways of behaving. So
Speaker 3: if you lock atoms in place, boom, you got a solid.
Speaker 3: You allow those bad boys to flow. He doesn't say
Speaker 3: bad boys. I'm saying bad boys. You allow them to flow.
Speaker 3: You have a liquid or a gas, you force charged
Speaker 3: partnerships apart, and you have a plasma. So boom done, right,
Speaker 3: we at least figured out matter, except we haven't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we kind of did, except we figured out through
Speaker 4: those particle accelerators and smashing atoms together, that certain subatomic
Speaker 4: particles spin.
Speaker 2: They spin in different ways, They spin in cycles, sometimes up,
Speaker 2: sometimes down, and those little bitty things that spin in
Speaker 2: different directions do different things. And when you can get
Speaker 2: them spinning in certain ways, you can create literally new
Speaker 2: forms of matter.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Back in twenty twenty three, scientists working in the
Speaker 3: US and China discovered a new state of matter, the
Speaker 3: chiro Bo's liquid state c h I r al Bo's
Speaker 3: liquid nothing to do with the bo speakers. Sadly, you're
Speaker 3: not going to find this form of matter sold in
Speaker 3: your grocery store. Instead, Okay, we can't get too deep
Speaker 3: here because we're not professors. But instead, this matter exists
Speaker 3: in a thing that is so confusing it's literally called
Speaker 3: a quote frustrated quantum system. Yes, which sounds like, you know,
Speaker 3: an album name for a post rock band.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fair. Look, and here's the guy with a
Speaker 2: video degree saying this is confusing you, Ben, I'm not
Speaker 2: even gonna try.
Speaker 3: Okay, here, we'll try we'll try together and then Dylan,
Speaker 3: if we get it wrong, we're gonna forward the emails
Speaker 3: to our complaint department. Jonathan Strickland at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 2: Okay, uh, let me give you something that is a quote.
Speaker 2: Here's a quote from tiggerin Sedrican Sedric Jan from the
Speaker 2: University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is how the constraints are
Speaker 2: controlled for the particles and they get frustrated. Here's the quote.
Speaker 2: It's like a game of musical chairs designed to frustrate
Speaker 2: the electrons. Instead of each electron having one chair to
Speaker 2: go to, they must now scramble and have many possibilities
Speaker 2: in where they sit.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it, allergy.
Speaker 3: That's one of the best ways to learn. Right, this
Speaker 3: system that they created, this frustrated quantum system ten ten
Speaker 3: on the name guys, no notes, Like you said, Matt,
Speaker 3: it prevents particles from doing the normal predictable interactions that
Speaker 3: they would have in any other system. Right. The musical
Speaker 3: chairs analogy is pretty cool. It's important to note this
Speaker 3: is not just a theory that sounds good on paper.
Speaker 3: These folks actually got together and the boffins built a system,
Speaker 3: a real life physical system. It's a semiconducting device, and
Speaker 3: it's got two layers. The top layer has an embarrassment
Speaker 3: of electrons and the bottom layer has a bunch of
Speaker 3: holes for the electrons to naturally traverse into thing is
Speaker 3: as said Rakken, saying, there are not enough holes for
Speaker 3: all the little electro buddies. So essentially, by these poor
Speaker 3: electrons and leaving some homeless, these physicists redefined some of
Speaker 3: our most basic assumptions about the nature of matter. I
Speaker 3: think the Greeks would be impressed or you know, maybe terrified,
Speaker 3: maybe both. Maybe they would say, hey, guys, stop.
Speaker 2: Like why are you doing this?
Speaker 3: Guys? We told you it's earth, it's air, it's water,
Speaker 3: and it's fire.
Speaker 2: Please stop be dicks.
Speaker 3: We forgot heart, and of course heart which comes with
Speaker 3: a monkey. So we were also talking about this briefly
Speaker 3: off are. That's one example, but it turns out there
Speaker 3: are multiple examples of what technically qualifies new states of matter.
Speaker 2: This is the one that okay, we got to talk
Speaker 2: about it for a second. Fire and ice half ice,
Speaker 2: half fire, right, Why, it's a new thing. That's what
Speaker 2: I was talking about with the spin. It's it's quantumly
Speaker 2: linked particles that have weird spin that are both fire
Speaker 2: and ice but not really. They have upspin and downspin cycles,
Speaker 2: and when they do that, they get weird and they
Speaker 2: do weird stuff that I don't understand. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it goes back to a quote we'll
Speaker 3: get to in a moment, which means so much to
Speaker 3: all of us and hopefully to you listening along at home. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the half ice, half fire phase of matter they call it.
Speaker 3: You can read more about it in fizz dot org,
Speaker 3: phys dot org. A great article by Lauren mcdrichian west
Speaker 3: Over at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Half eyes, half fire
Speaker 3: physicists discover new phase of matter in a magnetic material. Look.
Speaker 3: We read through this, and we also read through a
Speaker 3: description of the work by the researchers responsible for this discovery,
Speaker 3: and gotta be honest, deep water right counterintuitive if we're
Speaker 3: being diplomatic. And the idea here is that if they
Speaker 3: find a new state of matter with what are described
Speaker 3: as exotic physical properties, and if they can take that
Speaker 3: learning and control the movement between those two states, the
Speaker 3: ice and the fire as it were, then it could
Speaker 3: lead to some huge advances in quantum computing like it
Speaker 3: could have real world applications. This is not just a
Speaker 3: bunch of people growing rock crystals or sea monkeys, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean. This could change the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is for Qanna because because again, the quantum
Speaker 2: computing is the concept of having a thing that is
Speaker 2: both on and off essentially simultaneously. Right, So in human
Speaker 2: beings are using it for computing purposes right now. Who
Speaker 2: knows what else we could be using it for that
Speaker 2: we're just not thinking about yet. Which is one of
Speaker 2: the coolest things about this That Life Science article was
Speaker 2: written just on April first of this year, which means
Speaker 2: we're just on the cusp of understanding what the heck,
Speaker 2: what does that mean and how do we use it?
Speaker 2: Even the amazingly brilliant people who discovered it are saying, hey,
Speaker 2: despite this is a quote, despite our extensive research, we
Speaker 2: still don't know how this state could be utilized. We're
Speaker 2: missing pieces of the puzzle.
Speaker 3: Mm exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, it just it blows your mind. It blows
Speaker 2: my mind a little bit, agreed.
Speaker 3: I think if that doesn't blow your mind, you're either
Speaker 3: what of the most intelligent physicists on the planet, or
Speaker 3: you're not really thinking about it.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well let's think about it. Let's go to
Speaker 2: the quantum level. Some of the crazy stuff we talked
Speaker 2: about on Strange News recently. Didn't we talk about how
Speaker 2: energy was quantumly telep pretty recently?
Speaker 3: I can't remember if we talked about an air but yeah,
Speaker 3: they were able to transport it outside of the usual constraints,
Speaker 3: which would be very very low temperatures.
Speaker 2: But they're saying it. They're saying, okay, because I don't
Speaker 2: fully understand it.
Speaker 3: Guys, they're saying they could move energy on a quantum
Speaker 3: level without the same assumptive constraints that have always existed
Speaker 3: in classical physics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they wormhold energy from one place to another without
Speaker 2: going without that energy traveling through the space in between
Speaker 2: the two points.
Speaker 3: They essentially teleported it.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what And this is twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: What I mean superpositioning alone is you know what, let's
Speaker 3: do it first. There are even more new states of
Speaker 3: matter that are well on the way. We want to
Speaker 3: thank everybody's doing the research for that. May regrets saying this,
Speaker 3: but if you're a physicist, let us know the most
Speaker 3: exciting unsolved problems in physics. Let us know the experiments
Speaker 3: that weird you out the most. Let's go to quantum jazz.
Speaker 3: While we're waiting on those emails. One of our favorite
Speaker 3: quotes about quantum mechanics comes from a legendary professor, Professor
Speaker 3: Rama Murty Shankar. And if it's okay, Matt, I'd love
Speaker 3: to play just a brief clip of his bigger line.
Speaker 2: Oh I know this one.
Speaker 3: You remember this one?
Speaker 5: Man, one of the big figures in physics used to say,
Speaker 5: no one understands quantum mechanics. So in some sense the
Speaker 5: pressure is off for you guys, because I don't get it,
Speaker 5: and you don't get it, and Fineman doesn't get it.
Speaker 2: The point is, here's my goal.
Speaker 5: Right now, I'm the only one who doesn't understand quantum mechanics.
Speaker 5: In about seven days, all if you will be unable
Speaker 5: to understand quantum mechanics, then you can go back and
Speaker 5: spread your ignorance everywhere else.
Speaker 2: Boom. Not really because we don't understand it yet.
Speaker 3: What a cool guy, though, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I've watched I've watched other lectures by this professor and
Speaker 3: just an amazing, an amazing mind, and that I think
Speaker 3: that stands out to us because it is one it's
Speaker 3: super humble, but it's also one of like the best
Speaker 3: descriptions of how learning quantum mechanics works. You learn enough
Speaker 3: to realize that you don't get it, and that's from
Speaker 3: that's from multiple professors echo that statement.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: And so why are people so befuddled? It's because quantum mechanics,
Speaker 3: which is the fancy way of saying science dealing with
Speaker 3: the behavior of matter and light on those atomic and
Speaker 3: subatomic scales, quantum mechanics has a different set of rules
Speaker 3: of the road and we haven't fully figured those out yet.
Speaker 3: It seems to agree with some established principles, models, and theories,
Speaker 3: and then it kind of plays jazz with the rest
Speaker 3: of it. You know, it treats the stop sign in
Speaker 3: our earlier analogy like a suggestion, or it both stops
Speaker 3: and doesn't stop at the same time, or you know,
Speaker 3: it does every imaginable action until you look at it.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and there are actual quantum computers right now
Speaker 2: that are functional in being worked on and being used
Speaker 2: to simulate like we were talking about energy transportation right
Speaker 2: or energy energy teleportation. There are quantum computers that use
Speaker 2: these concepts right now to simulate what using those concepts
Speaker 2: would be like to harvest energy from far falling places
Speaker 2: and then store them inside themselves or inside other little
Speaker 2: cubits in the same way. And all of it just
Speaker 2: seems it just seems impossible because because for me, a
Speaker 2: kid that grew up on the basic physics that were
Speaker 2: understood in the mid nineteen nineties, all of this stuff
Speaker 2: was so outside of the realm of possibility that it
Speaker 2: really does. Man, I don't even know what I'm saying here,
Speaker 2: just other than it doesn't seem possible that there is
Speaker 2: a thing that exists as on and off in the
Speaker 2: way we understand transistors, that is so tiny and you
Speaker 2: can link those things up in some way and then
Speaker 2: use those things to figure out stuff that our best
Speaker 2: supercomputers can't do today. It doesn't compute there it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's enough to make some people understandably want to
Speaker 3: retreat back into Plato's cavern, you know what I mean, Like, yes, okay,
Speaker 3: I get that it's possible, but I've feel like it
Speaker 3: should not be possible. Where that's where, you know, you
Speaker 3: get the old trope of the king shutting down the
Speaker 3: research or people punishing Galileo. Sometimes current society will have issue,
Speaker 3: will take issue with truths that science is figuring out,
Speaker 3: or perhaps more dangerously, in this case, questions that science
Speaker 3: is asking. You know, we're civilization is a little bit
Speaker 3: better about it now, but the track record is not great.
Speaker 3: There's a dirty jacket at play. Yeah, okay, let's go
Speaker 3: to Cody Mure, writing for Quantum Magazine, who shares some
Speaker 3: popular characters from a lot of thought experiments. There are
Speaker 3: two infamous characters who are used pretty often, Alice and Bob.
Speaker 3: So let's say Alice and Bob having a nice night
Speaker 3: at home cooking dinner. All of a sudden, a series
Speaker 3: of events occur. List drops a plate crash. The sound
Speaker 3: startles Bob. Bob is cooking, he burns himself on the stove,
Speaker 3: and reasonably he goes h. In another version of events,
Speaker 3: Bob burns himself first and then cries out uh, and
Speaker 3: this causes Alice to drop the plate crash. In classical physics,
Speaker 3: only to your point, Matt, only one chain of events
Speaker 3: is true A to Z one to two to three
Speaker 3: right in linear time. In quantum mechanics, both of these
Speaker 3: things can be true at once due to the phenomenon
Speaker 3: known as superposition, and superposition is so cool, man.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, it's just Alice and Bob forever linked together,
Speaker 2: burning themselves and dropping plates. Yeah, yeah, so cool. What
Speaker 2: do you what do you think? What do you think?
Speaker 2: The quantum quarks think about that or whatever they're called.
Speaker 3: They think everything at once, depending on how they're spinning.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean? Sorry, man, this is familiar
Speaker 3: right to any fan of fiction or film. You might
Speaker 3: hear this loosely translated or popularized as the multiverse, And
Speaker 3: like you were saying, Matt, all the particles exist in
Speaker 3: all possible realities at once, up until the moment they
Speaker 3: are measured. Maybe we think we're not sure. And I
Speaker 3: feel like at this point in these conversations, just again
Speaker 3: for transparency, Look, Tennessee, and Matt and I are not
Speaker 3: currently high. It makes you feel like you're high when
Speaker 3: you have to think about this stuff.
Speaker 2: Because you can hear this, my voice exists, and because
Speaker 2: my voice exists, my mom had to exist, and because
Speaker 2: she existed, the trees in the forest where my grandfather
Speaker 2: grew up. You know, like all of that, all of
Speaker 2: those things, when you think about the reality of it,
Speaker 2: the true the true thrust of physics, trying to understand why,
Speaker 2: why is? Why is right?
Speaker 3: What is? What is?
Speaker 2: And why right?
Speaker 3: And again the damning dilemma, the bag of badgers that
Speaker 3: we call the observable universe, which factors in human observation
Speaker 3: of time. Right is the concept of linear time and
Speaker 3: illusion filtered through senses that are inadequate for the totality
Speaker 3: of reality. Is time simply one uh one nonlinear eternal
Speaker 3: moment of the universe in some way experiencing itself through
Speaker 3: different aspects? Is there as we're recording right now? Is
Speaker 3: there still a moment in time where wherein Matt pursues
Speaker 3: a different degree at Georgia State or at an entirely
Speaker 3: different institution. Is there a world in which something like
Speaker 3: meat does something very similar? Impossible questions to answer because
Speaker 3: we only know the reality we can observe, and at
Speaker 3: the risk of sounding cliche, that poses a logical issue
Speaker 3: when we say observation may change things.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, yes, I want to say it was last
Speaker 2: year around this time, when I can't remember the Scientific
Speaker 2: American or New Scientists on one of those publications wrote
Speaker 2: something about how human brains alter time, But it's not
Speaker 2: actually altering time. It's altering our perception of time. And
Speaker 2: when it goes back to the observer concept of whether
Speaker 2: or not just us observing anything, us observing the quantum level,
Speaker 2: you know, for the first time in human history, does
Speaker 2: that somehow alter how it functions? Or is it? Does
Speaker 2: it all just function that way? And we're trying to
Speaker 2: harness something you know that maybe maybe is outside of
Speaker 2: our possible grasp just because of scale. Right.
Speaker 3: See also our conversation about the possibility of prescients or
Speaker 3: prognostication and dreams right. And the quantum the quantum scale
Speaker 3: function of the human brain. Right, it gets into some
Speaker 3: very enjoyable but very treacherous waters. And with that idea
Speaker 3: of you know, if we conflate, if we could correctly
Speaker 3: conflate observation and consideration, think a consciousness thinking about a thing,
Speaker 3: and then that counts as observation, right, And then that
Speaker 3: could mean that we run into certain cognitive dangers info hazards. Right.
Speaker 3: It's crazy, man, But I think all of this shows
Speaker 3: us just how some purportedly ironclad laws of physics can
Speaker 3: be and how they can truly fall short of explaining
Speaker 3: the mechanics of what we know as reality and Matt,
Speaker 3: we have not even explored black holes. We talked a
Speaker 3: little bit about quarks, but we haven't gotten down into
Speaker 3: the great pickle of what comprises a quark right now,
Speaker 3: that's like the smallest thing. No matter how much energy
Speaker 3: we throw at it, we can't break it into sub
Speaker 3: quarks just yet. We haven't talked about that. We've alluded
Speaker 3: to but have not examined technological breakthroughs that are both
Speaker 3: powered by discoveries in physics and at the same time
Speaker 3: powering new breakthroughs in the future. I mean, maybe it's
Speaker 3: a story for another evening. Is this a part two?
Speaker 3: Do we have a part two on this?
Speaker 2: You think, well, there has to be. There's a part
Speaker 2: infinity of these episodes if we keep making them, because
Speaker 2: stuff's getting weirder and weirder. There was a thing that
Speaker 2: came out recently about fifty six Cuba quantum computer that officially,
Speaker 2: for the first time, demonstrated certified randomness. Yes, we talked
Speaker 2: about random number generators for a long time on the show,
Speaker 2: and what does that mean and how do you get that?
Speaker 2: And the new quantum stuff that we're talking about just
Speaker 2: officially did it? Pretty pretty awesome.
Speaker 3: And there's a new pope, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: It's all Abouty's game.
Speaker 2: It's like maybe he can come in and really solidify
Speaker 2: some of the stuff, you know, like yeah, how things.
Speaker 3: Weren't And Dylan asked, what if infinite parts of this
Speaker 3: series already exist? Love it? Love the optimism there. Well, well,
Speaker 3: at the very least, there is a universe, this universe
Speaker 3: wherein we continue this show most importantly with you, fellow
Speaker 3: conspiracy realist. I don't know, Matt, you know, in some
Speaker 3: way to wax a little, a little too poetic. Perhaps
Speaker 3: the first science isn't just this exploration of reality. It's
Speaker 3: kind of a metaphor, right for humanity's unquenchable curiosity. I
Speaker 3: sound like I'm in a weed shop or a dispenser
Speaker 3: in California.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, science be cool. Science is badass. It's just
Speaker 2: some of the things that are happening. I can only
Speaker 2: see them being weaponized some of Like when you're talking
Speaker 2: about quantum advancements, it'd be a beautiful world if we
Speaker 2: could actually use that stuff to make everybody's life better,
Speaker 2: to make you know, to clean up the earth, to
Speaker 2: make everything cool and hippie like that. I'll be down
Speaker 2: with that. But it's not it's gonna be weaponized. It's
Speaker 2: all gonna be weaponized until we can somehow drive all
Speaker 2: the weapons you know, into dust.
Speaker 3: Weaponized, commodified, Yeah, leveraged. I agree, especially with the constant
Speaker 3: hunt for funding. Right that is, the best explanation or
Speaker 3: the best historical pitch for funding is ultimately going to
Speaker 3: be some kind of geopolitical edge or military application, which
Speaker 3: is a shame. You know that war should be such
Speaker 3: a great driver of innovation. But since the first moment
Speaker 3: early humans looked at the stars, millennia and millennia go,
Speaker 3: civilization is still I would say, even without the military applications.
Speaker 3: Civilization is searching for a pattern right where we're taking
Speaker 3: our thumb and forefinger and rubbing the weft and weave
Speaker 3: of realities fabric, and we're always seeking a hole in
Speaker 3: that substance, right, and maybe we can get behind the curtain,
Speaker 3: maybe we can discover a vast conspiracy, right, the truth
Speaker 3: that scientists and religious institutions have sought ever since we
Speaker 3: thought to seek things. So, I don't know, man, it
Speaker 3: looks like we just arrive at more questions than answers.
Speaker 3: Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 2: I think so I'm just gonna sit over here and
Speaker 2: rub the waft and weave.
Speaker 3: Well. While we do that, we want to hear from you.
Speaker 3: What will we learn next? Should humanity? Should civilization keep
Speaker 3: asking these questions? Or is there a moment where everybody
Speaker 3: collectively says that's enough. We don't need to learn more.
Speaker 3: We can't wait to hear your thoughts. You can find
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Speaker 3: We are conspiracy stuff, conspiracy stuff, show some derivative thereof.
Speaker 3: You can also find us via telephone and email.
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