Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Classic Episode - Is the Universe Random?

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Classic Episode - Is the Universe Random? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: There's a core idea in science that experiments should be repeatable.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: If you do an experiment the same way different times,
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: you should get the same result.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: However, there is a loophole.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: There's a loophole in science.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that loophole opens a window into everything we
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: think is true about reality, in the universe and everything.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: In which we try to take the entire universe and
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: break it into bite sized pieces so you can enjoy
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: them with your afternoon coffee.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: I'm more I'm a cartoonist, I draw comics online.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I spend my
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: days smashing protons together at the large Hadron colliders to
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: try to reveal the secrets of the universe, mostly so
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: that I can tell them to you in this podcast.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Basically, only one of us is qualified to be explaining
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: things to you on this podcast.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: That would be the cartoonist. Yeah, physicists are not qualified
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: usually to be explainers. Mostly we just try to solve
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: the mysteries of the universe. We don't try to tell
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: anybody about them, right.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: Mostly physicists just need explaining.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: That's right, that's where the cartoons come in.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and spouses also, spouses of physicists probably have
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: to do a lot of explaining.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: You've got some explaining to do, exactly. Yeah. So we're
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: here to talk to you about big questions about the universe.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: And today's question is a really deep and basic question,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: and it's about the very nature of reality. What is it?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: What are we going to talk about today?
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: Is the universe random or is it just chaotic? And
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: what it's the difference?
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Or is it run by some super being? And we're
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: actually just in their simulation. But that's a whole other episode.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: That's a whole other podcast.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Right today, just the two sinister options, random or chaotic,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: you might feel like, ooh, neither of those sound very cozy.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: I don't want to live in either of those universes.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Well, the question basically breaks down to is the universe predictable?
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Like can you predict what the universe is going to do?
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Or is it that nobody can predict what the universe
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: is going to do?
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: Right? And I think that's why it's an awesome question
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: for science because for so many thousands and thousands of years,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: I think humans probably felt like the universe around them
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: was totally unpredictable. I mean they invented gods for this
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: and for that to try to describe how the universe
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: was out of their control and doing things that didn't
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: make sense, as if it had some you know, will
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: and agency. Right, Yeah, And then science comes along. It says, actually,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: there are rules and you can discover them. And slowly
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: science starts to creep in this description of the universe
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: that locks out this agency, this idea, this personality, and
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: gives you the sense that maybe the universe follows these rules.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: Right. So we went out and as usual'll ask people
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: on the street do you think the universe is random
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: or chaotic?
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: And here's what they had to say.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: That's gonna okay, that's a that's a thinker right there.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: I would say, surely random. With randomness comes chaos. You
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: never know what will happen, but there's there's always a
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: probability and a chance of things, of certain things happening.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: I'd like to say random. I'm religious, so I feel
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: like everything happens for a reason, and yes it is random,
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: but there's a purpose behind everything. I think it's a
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: mixture of both, Like it's random, but it can appear
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: chaotic because of how.
• 3:47
  Speaker 4: Everything is truly chaotic, because like on a smaller level,
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: everything is like moving really fast, but at like a
• 3:56
  Speaker 4: bigger level, we don't see any of that.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Wow, So would you think of those answers or hey.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: I think they were all over the place. They were
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: actually kind of random.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were random and chaotic. I feel like I
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: feel like people had no idea what I was asking them.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: You know, I feel like people just I feel like
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: they had no idea what they were answering.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Some of those people. I remember recording these interviews, and
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: some of those people as the words were coming out
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: of their mouth, I felt like they surprised them as
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: much as they did me. Like it was all over
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: the place.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I feel like some people it's interesting. Some
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: people related to that question to the other question, which
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: is like does the universe have a purpose, Like do
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: things happen for a reason or do they is it
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: just like a random role to die and nobody's really
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: in charge? Like that's the question, right, Like is somebody
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: in charge of the universe or is it impossible for
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: anyone to kind of predict what it's going to do?
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're right. That does get at the
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: heart of the question. You know, what's going to happen
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: in the universe and can we tell and can we
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: influence it? Right? Is the universe sort of churning on
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: without our ability to change direction at all in some
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: sort of way that's been determined since the dawn of time?
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Or can we nudge it and push it in one
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: way or the other? You know, make the Calves win?
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Or can you if you jump up and down in
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: front of your television enough where the Warriors win another
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: NBA championship? You know, can you influence the world? I
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: think that's an interesting and deep question. Yeah, that's probably
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the one people were actually having in their mind.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so may let's go back in history. And I
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: like how you think about this question a lot, Daniel,
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: which is that you sort of start with early man,
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: like the cave men and woman and women, early humans,
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: we're really just kind of at the mercy of all
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: the elements and all the animals out there and the
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: weather and so they to them, the universe was this crazy,
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: random and chaotic place, right.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And it actually it touches on sort of my
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: personal theory of consciousness, which is that we develop this
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: awareness because we are looking out into the world for
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: other people or other ideas. Are there intelligences and we
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: have this hyperactive ability to see agency, to see intention
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: in something that we don't understand, and we imagine that
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: there must be a mind behind it. And so I
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: think for a long time people's view the world was
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: that it was controlled by other greater minds. You know,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: what controls the lightning? Why do some people die of disease?
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: All this stuff?
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: And then as there must be like a consciousness that
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: is shooting out these lightning bolts or making it rain,
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: or you know, making the sun come out, or.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Killing my baby of some horrible disease, right, like, there
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: must be. It's hard to live in this world if
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: you don't have the sense that there's somebody else in charge.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Right there's a lot of suffering and a lot of pain,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: and a lot of unexplained events, and it's nice to
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: think somebody else out there is taking care of it,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: or somebody's in charge of it.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: But there's a reason, right.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that there's a reason that there's some design, it's
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: not just random. But then as history progresses, as we
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: were saying earlier, you know, science comes along it says, well,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: there are seemed to be some rules, not just like
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: that anything can happen. You can't have an ostrich here
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden the ostrich is gone.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: There are some rules that limit what can happen. If
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: you know what's happening now, there's a certain set of
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: possibilities for what can happen in one second and two seconds.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: And you know that's physics, right.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Well, it started with like noticing patterns, right Like lining
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: doesn't just come out of nowhere, It comes out when
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: there's these dark clouds in the sky, right.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely absolutely, And people started noticing patterns and started
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: putting those together and then asking themselves, can I use
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: what I've learned in the past to predict the future?
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Like, if I have the same set of events that
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: happened yesterday, I am I going to be able to
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: tell what's going to happen next week if the same
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: thing happens. If I roll a ball down the hill
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: yesterday and it goes up to a certain speed, will
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: the same thing happen tomorrow?
• 7:41
  Speaker 4: Right? Right?
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: Or if I throw a ball in the air and
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: I know which direction it's going and how fast it
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: is going. Can I predict where it's going to land exactly?
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: Where if I build a catapult, can I basically aim
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: it right exactly?
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: And that's how military technology drove science even hundreds of
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: years ago. Right Where do I shoot my cannon exactly
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: to get over that wall? Yeah?
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: Well that's kind of where Newton came in, right, Isaac Newton,
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: And that's why they say he kind of gave birth
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: to science, right, or at least the scientific revolution.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: No, I think it was earlier than that. Newton came
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: along well after folks like Galileo and Francis Bacon and
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: those guys. They really were the first ones to do
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: experiments and to say, let's see what the rules of
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: the universe is following, and let's see if we can
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: try to deduce them and use those to predict the
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: outcome of future experiments. They really were the first ones
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: to connect the idea of a scientific universe to the
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: actual experiments they do to influence those ideas and to
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: predict future results. And I think that's the key is
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: that here we've developed a system science which can not
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: only explain what we've seen before, but can predict the future.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: Now you are about to fire a cannon ball at
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: your enemy, you want to know where is that ball
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: going to fly? And it's incredible that physics can do that.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: It can literally predict the future if you know enough
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: about the situation right.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: Right, It's kind of like Google Maps. Now it can
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: totally tell if you're going to be late to meeting
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: or not, or to a podcast recording they're going to
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: They're like, like, how long will it take you to
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: get home? They're like, oh, they're going to be late.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: It's not always a hard problem though. Jege for example,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: it says if person equals whohe, then late equals true every.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Time every time.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: Data predictable data, and some of these things are simple,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: but some of these things are complicated, and it's incredible
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: to witness as physics sort of builds confidence and science
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: develops our ability to predict you know, chemical reactions and
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: biological functioning, all sorts of things, and then it gives
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: this creeping sense of is there anything that can escape science? Right?
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: Can science predict everything? Like if you knew enough about
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: the world, could you break it all down to cannonballs
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: to predict where all those cannonballs are going to fly
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: and then tell exactly what's going to happen.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's like kind of like if you know
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: that force equals mass times acceleration like Newton figured out
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: they and you can predict things like cannon balls and catapults,
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: and you could possibly predict like how a room full
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: of particles move, right, Yeah, possibly you can extend that
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: to can you predict how the whole world works? Yeah,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: what it's going to do, and what people are going.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: To do, extrapolate to the whole universe, right, Yeah, I mean,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: and that's the principle of determinism. It says, look, if
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: things follow rules, and the future is dependent only two things,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: one the rules and two the things that are happening
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: now the current state. Right, given if you know exactly
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: where things are, imagine the whole universe is just a
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: bunch of tiny cannon balls, and you know the rules
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: of those cannonballs, and you know the position and direction
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: of motion of all those cannonballs. Then in principle, given
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: a super powerful universe sized computer, you should be able
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: to predict the future one to five ten seconds into
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: the future, a thousand seconds into the future.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Like every single molecule, atom, subatomic particle. You should be
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: able if it follows rules, you should be able to
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: kind of track where it's going to go. Is should
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: tell you, based on where things are now, what's going
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: to happen exactly. It's kind of like this idea of
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: a clock, Right, is the universe giant clock just kind
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: of clicking along or is there some kind of magic
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: inside of it that makes it unpredictable?
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Right exactly? And the idea of the universe just being
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: a huge clock is both exciting and terrifying. Right. It's
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: exciting because like, wow, can you imagine we could understand
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: the universe that well, that we could predict the future,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: think about what we could do, right, But it's terrifying
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: because it's sort of like you're trapped in this science
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: cage where you have no influence over the world, and
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: everything you do and know and say in that joke
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: you're gonna make, in that fart you're gonna let slip
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: are all predictable, right, All those things are predictable. That's scary.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: It makes you feel like you are part of that
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: watch and you're just clicking along because of the you're
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: reacting to things around you in your initial conditions, and
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: so that's terrifying.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: And I think we have kind of an innate sense
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: of like rejecting this idea that we're trapped. Right, everyone
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: wants to feel like they have a free will, Like
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: everyone wants to know that they have a choice.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Right, Well, I guess so my kids don't feel that way,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: you know, like why did you hit your sister? Well
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: she hit me, you know, like, well, so what you
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: have no free will? Like you're completely determined by her behavior.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: I have that argument with my kids so many times.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: I'm always thinking about the philosophical echoes of that.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: My kids are always rebelling. They're like, we want free will,
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: don't us what to do?
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: I see? But they want you to follow rules. They're like,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: you promised daddy we could have ice cream, right, and
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: so therefore you have to there's no more decision to
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: be made.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Kids are so unfair.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: They're philosophically inconsistent. I think it's really the problem with.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they cute, but if.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: They just read some more Nietzsche, you know, and some
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: some Carl and some Popper or whatever, they would be
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: easier to be around.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, forget those picture books. Let's introduce let's predict the universe.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: I think there's something fascinating about the deterministic view of
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: the universe, but probably people out there thinking, Okay, maybe
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: in theory you could predict the whole universe, but in
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: practice that's impossible. I mean, you don't have a universe
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: sized computer to break the whole universe, and even to
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: predict like you know, a person is a huge number
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: of articles, and so to do that calculation just seems impractical, right.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Right, it's practically possible, But I think people revel just
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: to the idea of it, right, Like, are my thoughts
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: my thoughts or just something that I'm programmed and that
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: I will inevitably have and do.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's a really deep question. And so we
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: started out with prehistoric man feeling like the universe is
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: full of random not random, but unexplained agency and intelligence
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: all the way to like now, scientific physical determinism says, actually,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: the universe just clicks along like a watch, right, and
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: there's no free will. So let's take one step back
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: from that, and that's chaos. That says, well, maybe the
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: universe is deterministic, sure, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: practical for you to predict it because the way things
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: play out is really sensitive to exactly how things started.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: Well, I think some people who responded to their question
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: maybe weren't sure about the difference, right, Like, what's the
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: difference between something being chaotic and something being random?
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Right? And so let's drill into that. So let's take,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: for an example, the roll of a dice. Right, people
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: think of rolling dice as random, but actually it's chaotic,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: meaning that it's hard to predict, but it is deterministic.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Oh what do you mean?
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: If you knew exactly how I threw the dice, like
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: exactly the direction and the spin and all the molecules
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: of the air, then you could treat them moll like
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: the little cannonballs, little particles, and you could model how
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: it rolls, and you could, in theory, predict exactly how
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: the dice rolled every time.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: Meaning like if I'm seeing footage of you throwing to die,
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: and like I pause the video just as to die
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: leave your hands, then I could you know where they are,
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: I know which direction they're going, how fast are going.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: I could run some kind of computer simulation to like
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: follow the die and predict what they're going to do
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: when they bounce off the table and roll around, I
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: could potentially predict what the dye are going to show.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: That's right, because we're saying that the universe in that
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: case is deterministic, and so you should be able to
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: predict the future given enough information about the setup. Right now,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: that's a hard problem, and that's why we use dice,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: right because it's really difficult, and nobody can practically, like
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: bring a mini computer into Las Vegas and use that
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: to predict who's going to win it Craps, right though
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: in theory, In theory, you could if the universe was
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: deterministic but very sensitive to exactly how somebody's rolling the dice. Right,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: when you throw the dice at Craps, if you flip
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: it this way or that way, then it's going to
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: bounce slightly differently, and how it's going to hit that
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: you know, the felt on the table. It's all very
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: very sensitive, and a very small change and how you
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: throw it can result in a totally different number. That's
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: what we mean by chaos.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: It means that it's like the butterfly effect, right, like
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: the idea that if you butterfly flaps is wing here,
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: it's going to have a huge effect, maybe potentially on
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: the weather and on the other side of the world. Right,
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: it's like a very sensitive system.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: That's right. The weather is a great example because we
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: understand all the processes of weather. I mean, it's hot air,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: it's cold air, it's water. We know that stuff. It's
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: pretty simple chemistry. But all together, an entire planet is
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: really difficult to describe because it's huge and it's really sensitive. Like,
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: as you say, a butterfly flapping its wings in China
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: could change the way this air flows, which could change
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: the way that air flows, which bounces off this building,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: which turns into a rainstorm, which collides with this cloud
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and causes a hurricane. Right, it's not true that every
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: time a butterfly flaps its wings you get a hurricane.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: But sometimes so weather is chaotic, but it's not random,
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: is that what you're saying? That ren Like, if we
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: could keep track of every single butterfly world flapping its wing,
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: we would be able to predict the weather if we
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: had a giant supercomputer the size of the Solar System.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: But since we don't, then weather it seems random. But
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: actually it's chaotic.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Exactly, And that's exactly what scientists are trying to do.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: They're building bigger and bigger and faster computers to try
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: to simulate more and more of the Earth's atmosphere to
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: get better and better predictions of weather. In fact, I
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: think like all the top ten supercomputers in the world
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: are devoted to that problem, like modeling the weather, because
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: it's important. But you're exactly right, it's actually chaotic, meaning
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: it's deterministic but really sensitive to exactly how it started.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: But it seems random because it's too difficult for us
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: to calculate, and principle we should be able to, but
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: we can't. Another example is flipping a coin. Right, Based
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: on how you flip the coin, you should be able
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: to model how it spins through the air and how
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: it bounces off air molecule and how it hits the
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: ground and where it lands right, But it's a difficult problem.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: So we can use it to model randomness to say
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: it's kind of like randomness. Really it's just chaotic though.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: But then if I flip the coin one hundred times,
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: most likely half of those times will behead and half
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: of those times will be tails. Right, So where does
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: that fit into chaos theory? Like why is it predictable
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: on a statistical basis?
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that's fascinating. That's an emergent phenomenon. Right. That says,
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: if you understand the tiny little local laws of physics,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: like the laws of how the particles inside the coin move,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: you should be able to predict some larger effect. And
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: it's true, there is a simple or description of that
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: larger effect, right, if you understand how these things work.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: So physics works on these layers. Right, you can either
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: understand it a very low layer and try to model
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: it all the way up to a higher layer, or
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: you can just try to get an understanding at a
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: higher layer, just the same way. You could say, well,
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I can understand the way canniball flies by modeling all
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: the particles inside of it, or you could just use
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: F equals M, which treats the whole cannibal like one particle.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: If that's just a question of at what layer you're
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: modeling something, right.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Okay, so a coin is chaotic but not actually.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Random, but not actually random yet if the universe is deterministic,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: then a coin is chaotic but not actually random.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, got it, got it.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: But then there's the question of that's the Really the
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: nugget of the question is is the universe deterministic? You know,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: if you have a particle or a billiard ball or
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: a cannonball or whatever, and you understand direction it's going,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: can you predict its future out into infinity?
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Right? Right?
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Can you tell exactly what's going to happen?
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: But there's so many factors leading up to me tossing
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: the coin that it's so unpredictable that it's it's it
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: feels random.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: That's right. And so we have to separate between what's
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: practical and what's in theory possible. Okay, anything that's chaotic.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: We're saying, in theory, if you knew enough, you could
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: predict it, right, whereas but in practice that we can't.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: So it's it's it's so, it seems right, it seems random.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: Random number of generators and computers when they try to
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: come up with a random number, it's not really random,
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: you're saying, it's just an an algorithm. That's chaotic.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: That's right. Computers by construction are deterministic, right, We've built
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: them to be deterministic. Every time you run a program,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: it should give you the same answer. If you give
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: it the same input, right, there's no way for computer
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: to do anything but that. It's like a series of
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: logic gates. And you know, how it's implemented is not important,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: but you know, it's a system for doing deterministic calculations.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: That's what a computer is. So it's impossible for computer
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: to be truly random. All the random number generators in
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: your favorite Python code are actually pseudo orandom number generators.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: They're just chaotic. They take a seed a number to
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: start from, and then they spin off of that and
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: generate a sequence of numbers. But if you give them
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: the same seed twice, they'll generate the same sequence of
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: numbers twice.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Wow. So like if you're playing a video game and
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: you're inside of a virtual world, that world is totally
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: determinat absolutely it's been crunched on by a logical computer.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You do the same move every time, You'll kill
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: that boss character every single time. And not even in
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: silly games like you know, like punch Out, where the
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: guy is totally predictable, but even in more complicated ones.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: You know, if you're in the same world and you
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: do the same thing, the same thing should happen. Because
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: computers are not capable of true randomness.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: Before we keep going, let's take a short break. So
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: the question is is our universe like a computer simulation? Right? Like,
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: the question is is is our universe also being crunched
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: by a logical computer that can't be random?
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: That's right? And for a long time people thought the
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: universe was deterministic. I mean, we were able to predict
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: the outcome of every experiment. Things were going along really well.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: And then of course you can throw a spaceship and
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: land it on the moon.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: That's pretty crazy, right, Yeah, that well, that's pretty risky,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: but yeah, that's pretty amazing. You have to certainly have
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: confidence in our ability to predict the future if you're
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: going to get into that cannon ball get shot out
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: into space. Right.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I remember in gratz Cloths in this classic it's
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: called linear dynamical systems. But I remember in class, this
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: guy was so the professor was so cocky. He's like,
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: of all the technologies that contributed to putting a man
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: on the moon, this is the one that made it happen.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Linear algebra.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: I kind of had this linear algebra equation, we would
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: not be able to put a man on the mood
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: and so that's how powerful this idea is, right, like
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: if you can predict f equals in a you can
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: put a man on the moon.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's exactly right. And it's given us great
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: power over our environment. I mean, everything that we have
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: is because we have mastered a lot of the laws
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: of our environment and use them and bent them to
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: our will to improve our lives. Right, So it certainly
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: works and we rely on it every day. Every time
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: you get into a car or an airplane. You rely
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: on it working the same way it did yesterday, right, right, right,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: So that's that's a relief. But it was about one
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: hundred years ago when people started seeing things that they
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: couldn't explain, and it was quantum mechanics that told us
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: that maybe the universe is not deterministic. Maybe these little
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: particles don't follow the same rules that like billiard balls
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: and basketballs and larger objects follow, and maybe they're not
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: even deterministic, meaning if you do the same experiment twice
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: with tiny particles, you could get different outcomes, even if
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: you do it exactly the same way.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: And this all came about when people started noticing that
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: like light and things had a minimum size, right, like
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: light doesn't come in infinitely small bits of light, like
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: there's chunks of light.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, Einstein was looking at some experiments it
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: didn't quite make sense, and the only way he could
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: explain them was if light came in little packets. And
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: that's what quantum means. Quantum means a unit or a packet,
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: and so he suggested that maybe light comes in these
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: little packets. But then it had all these far reaching consequences,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: you know, about light going through mirrors and through prisms,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: and the way people could understand that was only if
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: there were various probabilities for things to happen, and it
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: began this whole revolution of quantum mechanics, which then Einstein
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: tried to put the brakes on, right. He was like, wait,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: hold on a second, guys, this is crazy talk. There's
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: no way the universe works this.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Way, meaning like, this idea of quantum stuff only made
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: sense if the universe work based on probabilities, not like deterministically,
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: you know, do you have to describe things with wave
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: functions and things aren't really like point particles or kind
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: of fuzzy things.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: That's exactly the point is that there's this fuzziness in
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: the universe and quantum mechanics because there's these minimum sized
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: objects and the way they interfere with each other and
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: the way the calculations happen. Quantum mechanics predicts that the
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: universe is fundamentally random, and it means that, for example,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: you have an electron, you don't know exactly where it is.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: There's a probability distribution that says, most likely it's here,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: maybe it's there, maybe it's somewhere else.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Is it that we can't is it like a randomness,
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: like we can't know where it is, or that there's
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: this trade off between like momentum and position.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Right, that's exactly the right question, and that's exactly what
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: people were asking. The looked at these equations and they said, well,
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: is it that we can't predict where the electron is,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: like it's totally impossible to predict. Or is it that
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: we just don't know where it is that we haven't
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: figured it out how to get that information? Right? Does
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: the information not exist or do we just not have it?
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: And so Einstein is the one who said there must
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: be some hidden variable, There must be something that these
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: particles are carrying, some piece of information that determines exactly
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: what's going to happen to them. But we just don't
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: know what it is I see. To him, it was
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: crazy to think that you could shoot an electron into
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: an experiment twice and get two different answers, But that's
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: what appeared to happen. People set up these careful experiments
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: where you would shoot a photon one at a time.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: You would shoot photons into an experiment, and every photon
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: would do something different, and then as you would accumulate
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: a bunch of photons, it would add up to give
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: you a distribution that made sense to you, just the
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: same way when you flip a coin, you get heads,
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: you get tails, you get heads, you get tails. It
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: seems random, but eventually it builds up to fifty fifty. Right.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Quantum mechanics tells us all we can do is predict
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: the eventual distribution. We can say, if you measure a
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: thousand electrons, some of them will go here and some
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: of them will go there. It says you can't predict
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: any individual one. All you can predict is the distribution
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: of outcomes.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: So Eistein was like, maybe a photon is kind of
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: like the coin. We were talking about before, like maybe
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: it seems random to us, but really it's just kind
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: of this chain of little local events that actually make
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: it predictable. That's right, if we knew all that information inside,
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: Like maybe it just looks fuzzy to us and we
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: can't tell where it is, but inside that particle really
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: actually knows where it is.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: It's exactly right.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: That's what he wanted to believe, right, that's.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: What he wanted to believe. And you got to sympathize
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: with the guy. Right, it's hard to imagine that the
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: universe would not be deterministic. I mean, we spent hundreds
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: of years building up our confidence in science and physics,
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: especially as being able to predict the future, and just
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: of saying, basically, the universe follows rules. Right, So now
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden you're telling us what there's like
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: dice in there? Is there some randomness like every time
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: you shoot an electron into you experiment, somebody or something
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: or the universe is making like a random decision about
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: where it's going to go. It seems crazy. So you're
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: absolutely right, And he suggested that a simpler explanation is
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: that they're carrying along another piece of information that we
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: just don't have access to or can't measure or didn't measure,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: and that that's actually determining in a totally predictable way
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: what's going to happen to each particle. That was his
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: solution to the problem.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: Well, he famously said God doesn't play dice, right.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Famously quoted as saying that I'm not sure he actually did,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: but it's oh, it's really But it's a pretty good
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: summary of what he believed.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Fakesight.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Well, like a lot of fake news, is the kernel
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: of truth in it. He certainly wanted to believe in
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: a deterministic universe and it made sense to him. And
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: you know what, it makes sense to me. I mean
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: the idea that there's like a true random number generator
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the universe that's making a decision every time
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: you shoot an electron into something. It's it doesn't make
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: any sense to me intuitively, you know, not that the
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: universe has to make sense to me intuitively, but it doesn't.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: So you're saying, the quantum mechanics says that there is
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: a randomness in things, and so where is that randomness
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: actually in? Like the position of particles in the velocity
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: in their like very being in their energy level. Where
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: is this randomness of everything?
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Well, there's randomness at every level. I mean there's randomness
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: between every time you look at something. So say, for example,
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: you measure an electron, you see it's a certain place,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: then you look away, right, because you can't monitor an
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: electron every moment or every nanosecond even you look away,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: what does the electron do between when you last saw
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: it and when you'll next see it?
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: Meaning like, if I know where it is and how
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: fast it's going, and then I look away and I
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: look again, is it going to be where I think
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: it's going to be?
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. And so every moment of an electron or
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: a particle's life is determined by quantum mechanics, which says
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: there's a probability distribution. It's not like the electron is
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: doing something behind your back. It's got one particular path
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: that you're just not aware of behind your back, and
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: you just don't know it. It doesn't have a specific path.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: It's not like it goes from A to B via
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: a particular path. It has a probability of different ways
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: to get there. WHOA And if you don't look then
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: it's sort of doing all of them at once. They
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: all have different probabilities, and those probabilities are the things
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: determined by the laws of physics. So there still are laws.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Physics still does tell the universe how to run. It's
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: just that those laws are probabilistic. It says, look, mister electron,
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: instead of telling you exactly where you're going to go,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: I'm going to say you have a seventy percent chance
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: of doing this and a thirty percent chance of doing that.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: So that's where the fuzziness and the randomness comes in.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: It's not that it like it looks fuzzy, it's just
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: that it's just hard to predict where it's going to be.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: It's impossible.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know all this information, it's impossible.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: It's impossible to predict the future.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: Impossible.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You can predict the various likelihood of so, the
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: likelihood of that at the particle level, but you can't
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: say what one particle is going to do. Wow. Now,
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Einstein said, that's crazy, right, there's no way that's true.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: There must be a way to predict it must be
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: there's some piece of information there. And then some guys
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: came up with an experiment. They came up with this
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: crazy experiment, it's based on an idea called Bell's inequality.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: To test this theory, they said, let's see if the
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: universe is really random, or if there's some hidden piece
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: of information that's actually secretly determining things.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: Like let's see if I really can't predict where that
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: electron is going to go, or if it's actually like
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: the electron knows, it just won't tell.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Us, yeah, right, exactly. And so they set up this
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: cool experiment where they took a particle and they had
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: to shoot out two particles in opposite directions. And those
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: particles are therefore connected because they have to conserve momentum
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: and they have to conserve energy and have to conserve spin.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: And so if you know something about one particle, then
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: you know something about the other particle. But both particles
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: have equal probability to be like spin up or spin down,
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: or point this way a point the other way, but
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: you know something about the combination of the two. And
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: so they came up with this really ingenious experiment to
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: measure how often you saw one spin up and one
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: spin down, for example, And based on the outcome of that,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: you could tell whether there was a secret, hidden piece
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: of information that was controlling both particles, or whether they
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: were both truly random. And the experiments are conclusive, and
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: it's been done a zillion times, and the experiment tells
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: us that the universe at its core really is random.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: That's making a random decision every time you look at
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: these particles.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: So beyond the shadow of a doubt, we know that
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: the universe is random.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: The universe is random absolutely. There's no there's no escape clause,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: there's no if hands or butts, there's no no loopholes.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: The universe at the particle level is really random. Now,
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: you said something really interesting earlier. You know, even if
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: the universe is random at the lowest level, that doesn't
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: necessarily mean that it's a random at other levels, right,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: Like we still got to the moon.
• 32:03
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: It's not like we're saying science doesn't work or you
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: shouldn't get in that airplane. Right. Science works at different levels,
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: And even if it's random at a very very small level,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: doesn't mean that on average it's really predictable, right, Like
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: we do know how basketballs bounce, right, And that's because
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the randomness only applies to these tiny, little particles and
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: over the ten to the thirty or whatever particles in
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: a basketball that all averages out to something very very predictable.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: Wow, So like random events Canada add up to predictable events?
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: Is that kind of what you're saying.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Like you can't tell how any individual voter
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: is going to vote, but if you've done enough polls
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: you can tell you know how the nation is going
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: to vote at a certain election.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: That worked out so well in the twenty sixteen election.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe that wasn't the best.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Example totally predictable. At the level of particles, there is randomness,
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: but maybe in the macroscale things are fairly predictable. Yeah,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: but how does that affect things like free will? Does
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: that mean that, like my brain, does quantum randomness give
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: me some sort of unpredictability or free will as you
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: might call it, Or is my brain also very predictable
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: in the long run.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: It's a great question, and into this tiny crack in determinism,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: you know, saying that at the particle level, things are
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: truly random. And there's flooded and enormous literature of consciousness
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: and all sorts of philosophy that try to connect free
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: will to quantum randomness, you know, to say that this
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: is the whole we needed, This is what breaks determinism
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: and allows for me and my soul and God and
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: all the and all the things you want to cram
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: into your universe. Right, I'm not convinced that quantum mechanics
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: allows for free will or for souls or you know,
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: for all that kind of stuff, but it certainly does
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: dismantle the deterministic watchlike universe that we thought we had.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: M So just because something is random doesn't mean you
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: have free will. Like it's just random exactly exactly. And
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: to sort of answer the question, you know, is the
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: universe random or is it chaotic? Turns out it's kind
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: of both.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Right, It's random at the particle level, but it's chaotic
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: at the macroscopic level. Right, Things do seem to be
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: fairly deterministic at the macroscopic level, but then again they're
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: too chaotic to really to really model. So it's not
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: like you can predict the weather.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: It's kind of a progression. Like it's random at the
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: particle level, it's kind of deterministic at a medium range level,
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: but then as you get to larger and larger systems.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: Then it's chaotic and it's practically unpredictable.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So any answer you want there's
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: some place in the universe is.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I just pick a random, random answer and it'll
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: be yes.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: And maybe that's why people answered it's such a such
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: streams of gibberish to our question, because because they really
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: deeply understood that the universe was both random and chaotic.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: Wow, wisdom of the craw with some of the crowd.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Exactly, you average over ten random people and there is
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: some insight. Yeah, exactly, that's the whole that's the whole problem.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: The answer is the answer is yes.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: So I think it's it's fun to think about that
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: in sort of the larger context, you know, like we
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: started off thinking the universe was crazy, then we started
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: to get some grips on it. Then we felt like, oh,
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: maybe the universe is sort of too tight a grip
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: on us because it seems deterministic, right, and they we've
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: got this crack thanks to quantum mechanics that says it's random.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: But I don't really know how comfortable people are with
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: that crack, you know, to think that the universe doesn't
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: know what it's going to do at any moment, like
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: they could do this, it could do that. That's sort
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: of terrifying. I understand Einstein's fear. That Einstein's dislike or
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: disdain for that, and that leaves us in a sort
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: of uncomfortable position.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: And it might get even crazier, right, Like, let's say
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: that we build quantum computers and then there's AI based
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: on quantum computers. That that would be even crazier.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I'd love to read that science fiction novel
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: that's how that's how AI develops free will, right, quantum computers?
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, more than us, that's exactly right. All right, Well,
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: thank you for joining us. I hope that didn't seem
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: like a random, random or chaotic discussion.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: But those are really fun topics. I think it's super
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: fun to try to wrap your mind around those things.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: And you know, one of the basic questions of physics
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: is not just what is the world made out? Or
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: what are the bits and pieces? But like what are
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: the rules? And are there rules? And you know, can
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: we ever understand it? To me, that's one of the
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: deepest questions of science. And this goes right to the
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: heart of it.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: So if you're a butterfly out there, keep on flam exactly.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: If you still have a question after listening to all
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.