Latest / The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast / Scientists Prove Atoms Can Exist in Two Places at Once

Transcript

Scientists Prove Atoms Can Exist in Two Places at Once · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: I want you to try something for a second. Just
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: sit exactly where you are right now. Feel the weight
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: of your body in the chair or the ground beneath
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: your feet, Notice the temperature of the air, the ambient
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: sounds in the room. You are entirely physically present right
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: there in that one specific measurable coordinate in the.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: Universe reality exactly. Yeah.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Now, I want you to imagine that at this exact
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: same millisecond, you are also sitting in the next room
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: over which is and I need to be incredibly precise here.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: I do not mean a clone of you. No, I
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: don't mean a hologram or like a digital projection or
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: an identical twin. I mean your singular physical body, with
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: all its weight, its mass. That's atomic structure physically existing
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: in both locations at the exact same moment.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: It creates a visceral sense of cognitive dissonance just trying
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: to picture it. It really does, because the human brain
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: simply hasn't evolved to process that kind of spatial paradox.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: You know, everything about our everyday survival depends on objects
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: being in one definite place at one definite time. I mean,
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: the idea of a physical object occupying two separate spaces simultaneously.
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: It feels like a fundamental glitch in reality.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: It sounds like pure unadulterated science fiction. Yeah. Absolutely, But
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: as of March twenty twenty six, it is no longer
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: a thought experiment.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: It really isn't.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: It is a documented, directly observed physical fact. Quantum physicists
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: have a fear caught pairs of atoms doing.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: Exactly this, which is wild.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: They forced physical matter to exist in two places at once.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: So we are going to unpack how a team from
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: the Australian National University, specifically led by doctor Sean Hodgman,
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: along with lead author yogish Esethreea and some collaborators from
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: the University Queensland and Olahoma, how they actually achieved this.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a massive breakthrough.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: We're going to break down the sheer mechanical impossibility of
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: the maze they build to prove it.
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: The rarity tapster set up, yeah.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and why it completely shatters our classical understanding of
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: reality and how catching these atoms red handed might solve
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: basically the single biggest, most stubborn mystery in the entire universe.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: Which is the clash between quantum mechanics and gravity. Right
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: for a century, physics has just been staring at this massive,
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: irreconcilable paradox between how the very small behaves and how
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: the very heavy behaves, and this experiment is honestly the
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: first real bridge across that chasm.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: I want to focus on that distinction between the very
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: small and the very heavy because I feel like we've
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: all read the pop science headlines about, you know, quantum weirdness.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: Oh definitely, it's everywhere.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: People hear words like superposition and entanglement all the time,
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: the idea of things being in two places at once
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: are communicating instantly across space. Hasn't this kind of thing
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: been done before? Right? Yea? My instinct is that this
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: isn't the first time scientists have shown something existing in
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: his superposition.
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: You're touching on a really crucial caveat there. It has
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: been done, but almost exclusively with light, photons or you know,
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: occasionally with atoms that are rigidly locked inside artificial magnetic
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: or optical traps, like completely immobilized, so they aren't moving exactly.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: But doing this with freely moving atoms, atoms that have
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: actual mass, that are traveling untethered through physical space, that
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: is a completely different domain of physics. Wow, the A
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: and U team achieved what previous experiments could really only
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: vaguely hint at for massive particles.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: So if I'm trying to like visualize the difference here,
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: doing this with light with photons, yeah, feels a bit
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: like throwing a shadow across a room.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: Oh that's a good way to look at.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: It, right, because you can split a shadow, you can
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: make it dance, you can project it onto two opposite
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: walls at the same time. Sure, it's eerie and it's
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: not intuitive, but a shadow is weightless.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, photon has no rest mass.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: But doing this with an actual freely moving atom, that's
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: like taking a physical, leather stitched baseball, throwing it across
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: a field and demanding that it lands in two different
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: catchers mits at the exact same time exactly.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: The baseball has weight, it has a physical presence, and
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: that transition from weightless light to a physical baseball fundamentally
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: alters the mathematics of the experiment. Why is that Because
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: mass is the anchor for gravity. Photons particles of light,
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: They just do not experience the universe the same way
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: a solid piece of matter does.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Right. Okay, when you.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: Deal with photons, you are operating almost in highly within
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: the clean, isolated sandbox of quantum mechanics. Yeah, but the
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: moment you introduce freely moving atoms, you are suddenly forcing
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: quantum mechanics the physics of the microscopic, probabilistic world to
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: play in the exact same arena as.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: Gravity, which is the macro world.
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: Right, which is the physics of the heavy deterministic world.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: And those two rule books do not talk to each
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: other at all. Usually, the physics of the tiny and
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: the physics of the massive completely ignore one another. Like,
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: if I calculate the trajectory of a baseball, I don't
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: need to factor in the quantum superposition of its quarks.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: No, you'd be laughed out of a physics class, right.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: And if I'm looking at an electrone, its gravitational pull
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: is so infinitesimally small it doesn't even register in the math.
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: They are completely isolated regimes. But by taking an atom,
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: which is inherently a quantum object, and allowing it to
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: move freely with its mass, which makes it a gravitational object,
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: you are forcing an overlap. Wow, You're demanding that a
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: physical piece of matter stop acting like a solid, predictable
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: object governed by gravity and inertia, and start acting like
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: a probabilistic ghost.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: Which begs the immediate mechanical question, right, how do you
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: physically force a piece of solid matter to give up
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: its solidity?
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: That's the challenge.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: If I have a helium atom, and we'll get into
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: why they used a very specific type of helium later,
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: but how do I convince it to stop being a
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: tiny billiard ball and become a wave that can exist
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: in two places?
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: You strip away its energy. Ok, you have to subject
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: it to an environment so extreme that the fundamental classical
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: nature of the matter just begins to unravel. But freezing
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: it exactly, You have to freeze it to a temperature
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: or just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: Let's bypass the basic idea of cold for a second,
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: because we aren't talking about ice cubes here. Now, we
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: aren't even talking about liquid nitrogen. When we say temperature
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: in physics, we are really just talking about speed, right.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: Heat is vibration. If a cup of coffee is hot,
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: the molecules inside are vibrating in cream into each other frantically.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: So when this team takes metastable helium four atoms and
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: plunges them down to near absolute zero, they aren't just
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: making them chilly. They are aggressively applying the brakes.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: They are draining almost every single drop of kinetic energy
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: out of the system. I mean, at room temperature, the
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: atoms in the air around you are bouncing off each
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: other at hundreds of miles per hour. Their physical identity
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: as localized particles, as tiny hard dots, dominates their behavior
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: because they're constantly interacting, colliding, and defining their positions relative
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: to one another. But as you drain the heat, as
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: they slow down toward absolute zero, the rules of classical
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: physics begin to fail.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: This is where we hit the wave particle duality, isn't it.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: I think the textbook explanation is usually that everything is
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: both a particle and a wave, but that always felt
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: kind of abstract to me. I mean, if everything is
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: a wave, why doesn't my car smear out into a
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: wave when I park it in.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: The driveway because of the de Brogley wavelength. Go on,
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: ugly wavelength. Every physical object has a wavelength associated with it,
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: but that wavelength is inversely proportional to its momentum. Oh
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: so your car is incredibly massive, right, so its wavelength
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: is unimaginably small, So small it's entirely undetectable. Even a
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: single atom at room temperature is moving fast enough that
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: its wavelength is basically negligible. It acts like a localized particle,
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: like a little dot exactly. But when you slow an
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: atom down to near absolute zero, its momentum drops to
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: almost nothing. And as momentum drops, the wavelength expands.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: The physical boundaries of the atom literally begin to blur.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: Yes, the atom smears out across space. It becomes less
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: of a thing located at a specific point and more
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: of a localized cloud of probability. And when you have
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: an entire group of these ultracold helium atoms confined together,
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: they're expanding. Waves begin to physically overlap.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: I was trying to visualize how this overlapping works, and
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: tell me if this makes sense, go for it. Imagine
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: you're standing on a highway overpass at night, taking a
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: long exposure photograph of the traffic. Okay, at normal speeds,
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: the cars just look like streaks of light, right right,
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: You know, they are individual cars, but they're moving so
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: fast they leave a blurred trail on the camera. But
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: now imagine the cars themselves are actually stretching out, like
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: the physical metal of the cars is elongating as they
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: slow down. If they slow down enough, the front bumper
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: of one car stretches so far it overlaps with the
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: back bumper of the car in front of it. Yes,
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: eventually all the individual cars stretch and melt into one continuous,
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: unbroken ribbon of metal on the highway. You can't point
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: to a single car anymore. There's only the collective ribbon.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy. That is exactly the phenomenon
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: occurring in a Bose Einstein condensate.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Oh so that's what a BC is.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah. The individual helium atoms lose their discrete identities. They
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: merge into a single macroscopic quantum state. The entire cloud
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: of atoms behaves as one single continuous matter wave.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: So the team at A and U has this incredibly
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: fragile smeared out cloud of helium probability. Right, But just
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: having a Bose Einstein content state isn't enough to prove
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: an atom can be in two places at once. You
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: have to do something with it, right.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: You have to force the waves to interact. You have
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: to create a state of entanglement between the constituent parts
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: of that wave.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: How did you do that?
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: Well? The scientists took two of these bosones Doune condensates,
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: two of these smeared out quantum waves of helium, and
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: they smashed them into each other.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: Smashing waves together sounds messy. I mean, I'm picturing two
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: ocean waves colliding and just exploding into white water and foam.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: In classical physics, sure a collision is violent and chaotic,
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: but at near absolute zero in the quantum realm, the
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: collision is exquisitely precise. They use what is known as
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: enswave collision. Because the atoms are behaving as spherical waves
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: rather than hard spheres, they don't bounce off each other
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: with sharp angles.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Wait, how does enswave collision work If they aren't bouncing?
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: What are they think about dropping two pebbles into a
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: perfectly still glassy pond? Right next, to each other. Okay, Yeah,
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: the ripples spread outward as expanding perfect circles. When the
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: ripples from the first pebble intersect with the ripples from
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: the second pebble, they don't ricochet.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: Backward, right, They pass right through exactly.
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: They pass through each other. As they overlap. They create
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: a complex symmetrical interference pattern, places where the water peaks
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: higher and places where it flattens out entirely.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Oh, I could picture that that spherically.
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: Symmetric scattering is the hallmark of an ouswave collision. As
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: these two BC clouds pass through each other, individual pairs
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: of helium atoms scatter out of the collision in a
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: spherical halo.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, so, out of this incredibly gentle overlapping interference pattern,
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: individual pairs of helium atoms emerge, flying away in opposite directions.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: But because they were born from this unified, smeared out
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: wave state, they aren't just two independent atoms anymore. They
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: are tethered.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: They emerge in a state of momentum entanglement.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: Momentum entanglement. This is what I want to pause, because
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: understanding this specific type of entanglement seems to be the
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: entire key to why this March twenty twenty six paper
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: is such a massive breakthrough.
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: It absolutely is.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Let's break down the difference because when I hear about
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: quantum computing or previous entanglement experiments, they usually talk about
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: entangling the spin of an electron or the polarization of
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: a photon.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: Right, and spin and polarization are internal states. Okay, you
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: can think of them as internal properties of the object itself,
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: independent of how the object is moving through the world.
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: Like if you have a spinning top, whether you carry
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: it across the room or leave it on the table,
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: it's internal rotation. Its spin remains its own discrete property.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Makes sense.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: Entangling internal states has been done for decades. It's profoundly strange,
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: but it doesn't fundamentally challenge or understanding of mass moving
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: through gravity.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: But momentum is fundamentally different. Yes, momentum isn't about what
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: the the atom is on the inside. It's a description
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: of where the mass is located and how fast it
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: is traveling through physical.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Space, exactly external motional degrees of freedom, external motional Right.
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: By entangling the momentum of these massive helium atoms, the
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: scientists aren't linking a hidden internal property. They are linking
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: the physical spatial trajectory of matter.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: So if atom A and atom B fly out of
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: this swave collision, their physical journey through space is mathematically
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: locked together. Yes, but it's locked together in a state
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: of superposition.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: This is the crux of Einstein's spooky action. At a distance.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: While those two atoms are flying through the vacuum chamber,
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: their individual momentum simply does not exist in a definite state. Wait, really, truly,
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: Atome A is not traveling left at one meter per
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: second and atom B is not traveling right at one
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: meter per second. Yeah, they exist as a blur of
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: all possible momenta within that spherical halo. They don't have
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: a defined location or.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: Speed until you measure them.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: Right the instant you place a detector in the path
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: of Adam A and force it to register a definite
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: physical hit, its wave function collapses. Okay, it assumes a
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: specific classical momentum, and at that exact instantaneous moment, regardless
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: of the physical distance separating them, Adam B instantaneously snaps
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: out of its superposition and assumes the perfectly correlated opposite momentum.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, here's where my classical brain just force fully rebels
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: against the physics.
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: I get it.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: It's tough because if I hear that two things fly apart,
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: and when I measure one, I instantly know the state
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: of the other, my immediate thought is that there is
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: nothing spooky happening at all. Sure, let me run a
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: classical scenario by you. Let's say I have a pair
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: of gloves, a left glove and a right glove. Okay,
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: I put them in identical, unmarked boxes. I give one
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: box to a friend who gets on a rocket ship
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: and travels to Mars. I keep the other box here
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: on Earth.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: The classic hidden variable argument, Right, If I open my
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: box on Earth and I see that I have the
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: left glove, I.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Instantaneously, with absolutely one hundred percent mathematical certainty, that my
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: friend on Mars has the right glove. The information traveled
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: faster than light. Sure, but there was no spooky magical connection.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: There were a left glove and a right glove from
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: the exact second I packed the boxes. I just didn't
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: know which was which until.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: I looked exactly So, why couldn't.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: These helium atoms just be a pair of gloves? Why
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: couldn't they have pre agreed on their momentum during the collision,
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: packed that information away internally, and just flown apart as
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: perfectly normal definite particles.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: You are articulating the exact skepticism that kept Albert Einstein
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: awake at night.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Really. Oh yeah.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: Einstein despised the idea that the universe was probabilistic at
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: its core, and he hated the implication of instantaneous communication
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: across space.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: He proposed the exact same solution you just did, that
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: the particles must carry a hidden instruction manual. In physics,
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: we call this the theory of local hidden variables.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: Leucal hidden variables.
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, local meaning the information is content within the particle itself,
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: and hidden meaning we just haven't figured out how to
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: read it yet.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: It's the most logical, comforting explanation it really is. It
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: preserves reality. It means the moon is still there even
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: when you weren't looking at it.
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: It does. But the genius of modern physics is that
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: we didn't just argue about it philosophically. We figured out
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: how to test it. Okay, we figured out a way
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: to prove whether the atoms had a secret instruction manual
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: or if the state truly did not exist until the
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: moment of measurement.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the maze. Yes, because to prove
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: they don't have a pre agreed plan, you have to
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: test the atoms in a way they could possibly anticipate
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: when they were created exactly. And the A and U
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: team did this using a mechanism called a rarity tapster
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: interferometer setup. Right now, I understand an interferometer conceptually uses interference,
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: but how do you physically build a maze for a
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: wave of matter? If it's a wave, it's spreading out,
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: how do you channel it?
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: Use light to build the walls of the maze?
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Light?
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the rarity test are your parrometer doesn't use physical
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: mirrors or glass beam splitters like you would use for
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: a laser beam. Because we are dealing with massive helium atoms.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: Physical barriers would just absorb or destroy them.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, that makes sense.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Instead, the team uses highly calibrated pulses of laser light.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: When the helium atom encounters the laser pulse, it undergoes
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: what is called brag scattering.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Brag scattering, Yeah.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: The laser light physically kicks the atom, splitting the matterwave
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: into two divergent paths simultaneously.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: Wait, the laser pulse literally cuts the atom's prodability wave
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: in half.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: Essentially, yes, that's insane. The matterwave of the single atom
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: is now traveling down two distinct physical paths inside the
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: vacuum chamber. At the same time, the atom is exploring
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: both routes of the maze simultaneously. And they do this
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: for both adam A and atom B.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: So atom A is split into two pads on the
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: left side of the room, and atom B is split
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: into two paths on the right side of the room.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: Now comes the critical part, the part that traps the
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: hidden variables. How while the matterwaves are in transit traveling
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: down these split paths, the scientists actively change the layout
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: of the maze.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: They change it.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: They alter what is called the interferometric phase.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: What does altering the phase actually mean in this context?
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Are they like lengthening the path?
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: You can think of phase as the alignment of the
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: waves peaks and troughs. If you slightly delay one path
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: relative to the other, perhaps by applying a subtle magnetic
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: field or tweaking the timing of the laser pulses, you
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: shift the wave. When you eventually recombine the two paths
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: at the end of the maze. How those peaks and
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: troughs align determines where the atom will be detected. If
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: the peaks align, you get constructive interference and the atom
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: hits detector one. If a peak aligns with a trough,
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: you get destructive interference and the atom hits detector two.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: By rapidly and randomly changing these phases, while the atoms
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: are already in flight, the scientists are constantly changing the
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: questions they are asking the atoms.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, I see the trap. If the atoms we're just
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: a pair of gloves, their hidden instruction manual would have
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: been written at the exact moment of the initial collision. Yes,
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: but there is absolutely no way the instruction manual could
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: contain the answers to questions that the scientists hadn't even
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: decided to ask yet. The layout of the maze is
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: changing after the atoms leave the starting.
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: Line, precisely if they are operating on hidden variables, their
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: coordination can only be so good they will inevitably make
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: mistakes when faced with unpredictable maze configurations. Okay, there is
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: a strict mathematical ceiling on how correlated their final detector
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: hits can be if they are relying on prepackaged instructions.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: This ceiling is dictated by Bell's theorem.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: So the scientists sit at the end of this laser
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: maze and they record the detector hits for Adam A
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: and Adam B across thousands and thousands of trials under
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: all these rapidly shifting phase configurations, and they analyze the
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: joint probabilities.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: Joint probabilities simply means we don't care what Adam A
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: does in isolation. We only care about the correlation when
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: Adam A goes to its detector ie, how often does
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: Adam B go to its detector two? Given the specific
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: phase settings of both mazes at that exact microsecond and
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: the results, the correlations blasted right through the classical ceiling.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: The joint probabilities recorded by the A and U team
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: exhibited strong Bell correlations that are mathematically impossible under the
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: framework of local hidden variables.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: So Einstein was wrong.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: He was. The degree of synchronization between the momenta of
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: these two freely flying helium atoms was so profound, so
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: flawlessly correlated despite the random phase changes, that it ruled
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: out any possibility of a pre existing instruction manual.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Which leaves only one possible conclusion. Yeah, the state of
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: the momentum genuinely physically did not exist. While the atoms
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: were flying through the maze, they were a pure blur
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: of probability. Yep. And the moment Adam A hit the
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: detector and was forced to choose a physical reality. It
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: instantly across physical space, forced Adam B to was soon
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: the corresponding physical reality.
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: The measurement didn't just reveal the state. The measurement created
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: the state for both particles simultaneously.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: The glove analogy is dead completely. Did It's more like
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: I open my box and inside is a vibrating sphere
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: of raw, undefined matter that is rapidly cycling through every
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: possible shape.
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's better.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: And the exact millisecond I look at it, it instantly
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: freezes into the shape of a left glove, and at
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: that exact precise millisecond, no matter how many miles away
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: it is, the other chaotic sphere of matter instantly freezes
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: into a right glove.
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: That's a great way to picture it.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: They coordinate their physical form in real time completely bypassing
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: the speed of light.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: It is a stunning realization. I mean when you scale
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: this up from weightless photons to massive atoms moving through space,
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: the philosophical weight of it becomes staggering.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: Doctor Sean Hodgman himself articulated this beautifully. He said, it's
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: really weird for us to think that this is how
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: the universe works. It's really weird to think that a
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: particle can be in two places at once.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: I love that quote. It strips away all the sterile
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: academic posturing, doesn't it. Even the researchers who spent years
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: building this microscopic fun house, who crunched the mathematics of
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: quantum mechanics every single day, look at the final data
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: and essentially say this is deeply unnervingly strange.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: It really is. And the lead author, Yogish Esathrea, pointed
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: out that this wasn't just a theoretical victory, but a
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: monumental triumph of experimental engineering.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Right because other people have tried this.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: Many teams have tried to do this with massive particles
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: before and failed.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Why is it so hard to actually pull off?
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: Maintaining a superposition of a massive particle is incredibly fraught.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: We talked about how fragile a Bose Einstein condensate it is.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the smeared out wighs.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: A single stray photon from the room, a microscopic fluctuation
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: in the magnetic shielding, a subtle vibration from the building,
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: any tiny interaction with the outside world causes e coherence ecoherence. Yeah,
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: the wave function collapses prematurely. The atom snaps back into
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: being a classical, predictable billiard ball before it ever reaches
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: the detectors.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Which is why the specific choice of the atom they
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: used was an arbitrary You couldn't just throw this experiment
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: together with carbon or oxygen.
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: No, definitely not.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: We mentioned earlier that the Aight and U team utilized
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: a clever trick by choosing matastable helium four. Why is
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: metastable helium the key to keeping this fragile superposition intact
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: long enough to measure it.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: It's all about finding an atom that satisfies a deeply
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: contradictory set of experimental demands. Okay, First, as we established,
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: the goal is to observe momentum entanglement in a massive particle. Therefore,
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: it must have mass, but it cannot be too massive.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Because if you try to push a heavy atom with
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: a laser, the laser won't have enough force exactly.
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: The laser pulses act as the walls of our maize,
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: relying on momentum transfer from the photons to the atom.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: If you use the heavy element like rubidium or caesium,
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: the kinetic energy required to split their wave functions cleanly
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: becomes really difficult to manage.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Ah, okay.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: Helium is the second lightest element in the periodic table.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: It possesses undeniable mass, confirming its interaction with gravity, but
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: it remains light enough to be elegantly and precisely steered
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: by the brags scattering lasers.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: Okay, so it has the perfect Goldilocks mass. But what
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: does the metastable part mean? What makes metastable helium different
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: from the helium I put in a party balloon.
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: A metestable atom is an atom that has been electronically
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: excited to a higher energy state, but due to strict
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: quantum mechanical selection rules, it is essentially forbidden from releasing
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: that energy and dropping back down to its ground state.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: So it's like holding its breath.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: That's an excellent way to conceptualize it. Normally, if you
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: pump an atom full of energy and electron jumps to
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: a higher orbit, and almost instantaneously it drops back down,
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: spitting out a photon of light in the process. But
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: in metastable helium, for the excite state is exceptionally long lived.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: It carries a massive internal payload of energy nearly twenty
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: electron volts, and it holds onto it while it flies
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: through the entire length of the interferometer.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Why is it useful for the atom to carry around
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: a payload of pent up energy.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: It solves the final most critical problem of the experiment detection.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: When you are calculating Bell correlations, your detection efficiency has
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: to be near perfect. If an entangled pair of atoms
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: goes through the maze and your detector only catches one
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: of them while missing the other, your joint probability data
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: is ruined.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, because you can't compare them exactly.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: You need to be absolutely certain you are detecting every
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: single atom that hits the end of the maze, and.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: A normal, unexcited helium atom at near absolute zero isn't
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: going to hit the detector very hard.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: It would barely register. It would be a microscopic silent
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: tap on the detector plate, right, But a metastable helium
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: atom is different. When it finally strikes the microchannel plate
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: detector at the end of the inner chrometer, it undergoes
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: a process called penning ionization.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: Penning ionization.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: Yes, it violently releases all twenty electron volts of its
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: pent up energy in a single explosive burst. Oh.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: That is brilliant, isn't it. It's essentially a tracer bullet.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: It carries so much internal unstable energy that when it
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: finally makes contact with the detector, it absolutely screams its arrival.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: The detector doesn't have to strain to hear a quiet tap.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: The atom triggers a massive electronic cascade. It makes single
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: particle detection incredibly efficient and unambiguous.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: It is a master stroke of experimental design. The medestoable
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: helium has the mass to bridge the gap into gravitational physics,
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: the lightness to be manipulated by lasers, the internal stability
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: to survive the maze, and the explosive energy to be
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: perfectly counted at the finish line.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: That unique combination is what finally allowed A. THREEA. Hodgmen
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: and the team to produce clean undeniable data.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: So we have established the mechanism. Yeah, we've explored the dpres,
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: the swave collision, the laser maze, and the brilliant tracer
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: bullet detection system. The A and U team has definitively
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: proven that massive particles can exist in a superposition of
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: momentum and can be entangled across space.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: They absolutely have.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: But proving Einstein wrong about hidden variables, while historically satisfying,
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: is really just the starting line for what this means
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: for the.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: Future of physical Oh yeah, this is just the beginning.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Because this opens new possibilities for testing the interface between
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Let's tackle the white whale.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: Why is this specific experiment the bridge to quantum gravity.
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: Well, to understand why this is the bridge, we have
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: to look at why the two theories fail to connect. Okay,
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: general relativity, Einstein's masterpiece, describes gravity not as a pulling force,
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: but as the warping of space time itself. A massive
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: object like a planet or a star, creates a curve
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: in the fabric of space, and other objects fall that curve.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: It is a smooth, continuous, deterministic theory.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: So space time is like a trampoline, and mass is
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: a bowling ball sitting in the middle, warping the fabric exactly.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: But quantum mechanics is fundamentally different. It is pixelated, jumpy,
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: and probabilistic. It dictates that at the smallest scales, energy
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: and matter exist in discrete packets or quanta. It says
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: that objects do not have definite properties or locations until
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: they are measured.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: And when physicists try to take the math of general
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: relativity and apply it to the pixelated, jumpy world of
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: quantum mechanics, the equations.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: Break, They catastrophically fail, they produce infinities, They output mathematical nonsense.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: We just have no working theory of quantum gravity. We
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: do not know how gravity behaves at the microscopic scale,
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: or how quantum objects generate.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Gravity, which brings us to the staggering implication of this experiment.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: We just spent the last half hour establishing that these
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: metastable helium atoms have mass. Yes, because they have mass,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: general relativity mandates that they must warped space time must
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: generate a gravitational field, no matter how small.
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: Correct.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: But we also just proved that these massive atoms can
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: exist in a superposition, they can exist in two completely
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: separate physical locations at the exact same time.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: This is where the physics gets incredibly profound.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: If an atom with mass is simultaneously existing in location
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: A in location B, does its gravitational field also exist
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: in two places at once?
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: Does it warp the fabric of space time from two
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: different coordinates simultaneously? Is gravity itself forced into a state
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: of quantum superposition?
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: That is the most important unanswered question in modern physics.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: The physicist Roger Penrose hypothesized that the universe might actually
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: forbid gravity from entering a superposition oh wow. He suggested
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: that the moment and objects superposed gravitational fields differ by
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: a certain amount of energy, the universe forces the wave
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: function to collapse. That gravity itself might be the mechanism
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: that destroys superposition and forces reality to be solid.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: But up until now, we couldn't test Penrose's idea, right,
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: We couldn't test any theories of chronum gravity because we
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: could only do superposition experiments with weightless photons that don't
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: warp spacetime the same way, or with atoms that were
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: too small and rigidly trapped to measure their gravitational effects
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: dynamically precisely.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: This March twenty twenty six experiment changes the entire landscape.
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: It provides a proven functional platform for manipulating massive particles
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: in macroscopic superpositions.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: That's huge.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: Future iterations of this experiment won't just look at bell correlations.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: They will scale up the mass. They will put heavier
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: and heavier atoms into the rarity taps or interferometer. They
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: will measure how the Earth's massive gravitational field interacts with
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: the entangled momenta of falling atoms.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: They can literally watch a particle fall through gravity while
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: it's in two places at once.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: Yes, if we can observe how gravitational gradients affect the
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: phase of an entangled massive particle, or if we can
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: measure the threshold where a massive superposition collapses under its
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: own gravitational weight, we will finally have empirical data for
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: quantum gravity. Wow, we will finally have the clues needed
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: to write a unified theory of everything.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: It is awe inspiring to think that a vacuum chamber
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: in Australia might hold the key to unifying the entire
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: universe's rule book. It really is, But the implications of
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: controlling massive entanglement aren't just confined to theoretical physics. We're
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: also looking at immediate, tangible applications. If we have mastered
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: the ability to entangle the motional degrees of freedom of
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: actual matter, what does that mean for the technology we
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: are trying to build today?
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: The most immediate technological revolution will be in quantum computing
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: and quantum sensing.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, so quantum computers use quibbitts, which leverage superpositions to
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: be a zero, a one, or both simultaneously right, allowing
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: them to process complex calculations exponentially faster than classical supercomputers.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: But they are notoriously finicky.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: They are incredibly fragile. Currently, most quibbits rely on those
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: internal states we discussed earlier, the spin of an electron
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: or the polarization of a photon. Because those states are
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: so delicate, the slightest thermal fluctuation, a stray, magnetic field,
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: or a cosmic ray passing through the laboratory causes decoherence.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: The quibot loses its quantum nature, the superposition collapses, and
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: the calculation fails.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: So how does entangling the physical momentum of a massive
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: atom help solve the fragility problem.
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: Because massive atoms are inherently less susceptible to certain types
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: of environmental noise than internal electron states. Oh really Yeah,
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: If we can build quantum logic gaits that operate on
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: the motional entanglement of massive particles using their physical trajectories
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: rather than their internal spins, we could theoretically construct quantum
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: systems that are vastly more robust. The mass provides a
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: stabilizing anchor against certain types of decoherence.
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: And what about quantum sensing? What could a sensor built
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: out of entangled massive atoms actually do well?
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: Because these atoms are in a superposition of moments, and
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: because they have mass, they are unimaginable sensitive to inertial
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: and gravitational forces. Okay, imagine a quantum sensor based on
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: this A and U technology placed inside a submarine. Currently,
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: a submarine deep underwater cannot use GPS radio waves don't
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: penetrate the ocean effectively. It relies on classical accelerometers, which
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: slowly drift and accumulate errors over days and weeks.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: But a quantum sensor using entangled massive tarticles wouldn't drift.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: It would be absolute. The phase shifts in the matter
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: wave interferometer are so hypersensitive to gravity that the submarine
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: could navigate by mapping the microscopic variations in the gravitational
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: field of the ocean floor beneath it.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: That's incredible.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: It would know its exact position on the planet without
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: ever needing to communicate with the satellite. Similarly, these sensors
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: could detect underground mineral deposits, hidden magma chambers preceding a
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: volcanic eruption, or microscopic shifts in tectonic plates.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: It turns the spoky weirdness of quantum mechanics into the
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: ultimate geological companies. Basically, yeah, that's incredible, But as fascinating
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: as the earth bound tech is, I want to pivot
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: to the largest possible scale.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: Let's do it.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Because this experiment also connects to the cosmos. It helps
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: model the early universe quantum fluctuations that seeded galaxy formation.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: How does an ultra cold helium atom in a lab
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: explain the birth of galaxies?
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: It's all about scale and origin. If we rewind the
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: clock approximately thirteen point eight billion years to the immediate
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: aftermath of the Big Bang, the entire observable universe was
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: contained in a space smaller than a single atom. It
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: was unimaginably dense, unfathomably hot, and entirely governed by the
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: laws of quantum mechanics.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: So the entire universe was essentially a giant quantum wave.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: It was a chaotic soup of quantum fluctuations, particles and
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: antiparticles constantly popping into and out of existence, existing in
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: vast interconnected webs of superposition and entanglement. Energy densities weren't smooth.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: They jittered and vibrated probabilistically.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: And then cosmic inflation happened. The universe expanded at a
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: rate faster than the speed of light for a fraction
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: of a microsecond.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: Yes, and when that sudden, violent expansion occurred, it took
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: those microscopic, probabilistic quantum jitters and instantly froze them. It
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: stretched them out across millions of light years of space.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: Wait, so the unevenness of the early universe, the slight
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: variations in density that eventually allowed gravity to pull gas
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: together into stars and galaxies and clusters. Those macroscopic structures
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: are just stretched out quantum superpositions.
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: Exactly The only reason the universe isn't just a perfectly smooth, uniform,
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: boring mist of hydrogen gas is because of the quantum
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: weirdness that existed before inflation.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: That is mind blowing.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: The largest structures in the cosmos, superclusters of galaxies are
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: the macroscopic scars of quantum entanglement. By using this new
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: platform to precisely study how massive particles behave in entangled
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: superposed state, today cosmologists can build much more accurate mathematical
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: models of those primordial quantum fluctuations. We can literally simulate
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: the seeds of the universe in a tabletop vacuum chamber.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: Which is mind bending. But there's also the most extreme
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: environment in the universe. Oh black holes. Oh yeah, there's
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: the black hole information paradox involving entanglement. Can we explore that?
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Because a black hole seems like the ultimate battleground for
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: general relativity and quantum.
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: Mechanics, it is the absolute limit of our current physics.
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: The black hole information paradox is deeply tied to the
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: concept of entanglement. Quantum mechanics has a bedrock rule. Information
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: can never be fundamentally destroyed. Okay, if you know the
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: exact quantum state of a system. You can always theoretically
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: rewind the clock and know it's past or fast forward
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: and predict its future.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: But general relativity says that a black hole has an
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: event horizon, a boundary of gravity is so intense that
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: not even light can escape. Anything that falls in is
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: trapped forever and eventually crushed into the singularity.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: Right and Stephen Hawking proof that black holes aren't entirely black.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: They slowly leak energy known as Hawking radiation, and eventually
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: evaporate away into nothing over trillions of years. This radiation
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: is borne from entangled pairs of particles popping into existence
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: right at the edge of the event horizon.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: One particle of the entangled pair falls into the black hole,
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: and the other particle escapes into space.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: Is radiation precisely. Now here's the paradox. We have an
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: entangled pair, their quantum states are linked. One falls in,
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: one escapes. Eventually, the black hole evaporates completely and disappears.
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: The particle that fell inside is gone.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, I see the problem.
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: So what happens to the entanglement. What happens to the
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: quantum information that was shared between them? If the information
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: is destroyed. When the black hole vanishes, Quantum mechanics is
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: fundamentally broken. If the information somehow escapes, general relativity is broken.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: And because we couldn't test quantum gravity, physicists have just
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: been arguing about the math for fifty years.
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: Yes, but the Annual Experiment provides a new conception and
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: experimental toolkit. By successfully entangling the momentum of massive particles,
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: we now have a physical analog that bridges mass and entanglement.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: While we can't build a black hole in the lab,
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: we can begin to design analog experiments. We can test
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: how the entanglement of massive particles degrades or reacts when
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: subjected to extreme accelerations or simulated gravitational horizons within the interferometer.
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: It gives us a physical mechanism to begin probing the
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: boundary conditions of the information paradox.
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: It is truly staggering how much ground we've covered. We
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: started this hour with a simple, almost absurd thought experiment.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: We asked you to imagine yourself sitting in two rooms
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: at the exact same time, and over the course of
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: dissecting this incredibly profound March twenty twenty six paper, we've
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: seen how scientists took that absurdity and made it real.
• 38:50
  Speaker 3: We walked through the deep freeze, stripping the helium atoms
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: of their heat until their physical boundaries dissolved, turning them
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: into collective overlapping waves within a bose Einstein and say.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: We explore the sheer elegance of the swave collision, allowing
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: those ways to pass through each other and birth pairs
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: of atoms inextricably linked by momentum entanglement their path through
• 39:12
  Speaker 2: the universe, bound together in a blur of probability.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: And we marveled at the rarity tapster maze, using laser
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: brag pulses to split their reality, altering the phase of
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: their paths in real time. The joint probabilities derived from
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: the explosive tracer bullet impacts of the metastable helium definitively
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: proved that the particles didn't carry a hidden instruction manual.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: They proved that the measurement of one atom physically instantaneously
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: forced reality to snap into focus for the other atom
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: across any distance faster than the speed of light. It's
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: a mechanism that paves the way for unbreakable quantum sensors.
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: Unravels the birth of galaxy clusters and might finally reconcile
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: the physics of the atom with the gravity of a
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: black hole.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: What stands out most vividly is the fundamental re evaluation
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: of our environment. Entanglement has been demonstrated in photons and molecules,
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: even in the vibrational states of small synthetic diamonds, but
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: achieving this with free flying motional atoms matter with mass
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: navigating through space brings this quantum strangeness one giant leap
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: closer to the macroscopic world we inhabit.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: It proves that reality at its deepest foundational level is
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: entirely probabilistic and densely interconnected. The solid, predictable determinism of
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: our everyday lives is a macroscopic illusion born from the
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: sheer scale of the quantum chaos underneath, which brings me to.
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: The final thought I want to leave you with. We
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: now know, proven by undeniable data, that the fundamental building
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: blocks of matter can dissolve into interconnected waves of probability,
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: they can exist in multiple places at once, and they
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: can tie their destinies together instantaneously across space. But those
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: building blocks. Those massive physical atoms are the exact same
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: components that make up the chair you are sitting in.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: They make up the structure of your car. They comprise
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: every single cell, bone, and neuron in your own body.
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: We are, in a very literal sense, entirely constructed of
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: quantum objects.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: So the lingering unresolved question is this, at what exact size,
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: at what specific magical threshold of mass, does the universe
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: decide to stop being a probabilistic ghost and start being solid.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: If the individual atoms in your hand are capable of
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: existing in two places at once and only choose a
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: definite state when forced by interaction, why is your hand
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: doing that? Where exactly is the line between the quantum
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: blur and the classical world. Think about that the next
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: time you reach out to grab your keys.