Latest / The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast / Why Physics Still Can’t Explain Most of the Universe

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Why Physics Still Can’t Explain Most of the Universe · 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: So if you were to take every single human being
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: on Earth right now, I mean all eight billion of
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: us right and you somehow found a way to remove
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: all the empty space inside the atoms that make up
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: our bodies, every single person, you could fit the entire
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: human race inside a single sugar cube.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, it is just a staggering visualization, it really is.
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: It perfectly sets the stage for what we're going to
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: talk about today because we are basically dismantling reality.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that sugar cube is really just the appetizer for
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: how weird the universe actually is. Because right now, wherever
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: you are listening to this, you probably feel pretty grounded.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Sure you're sitting in a chair, or maybe driving your car.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Walking the dog, whatever, the world feels solid. The rules
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: of cause and effects seem reliable, Like if you drop
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: your keys, they fall simple as.
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: That, they don't just float away exactly.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: But today we're going to strip away that entire comforting illusion.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: We are looking into the underlying architecture of the universe,
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: and we are going to show you that it is
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: entirely fundamentally broken.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: It really is a profound existential crisis in the world
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: of physics right now, because honestly, for the last few centuries,
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: human beings have been incredibly arrogant, oh and reasonably so.
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: I mean, look at our predictive power. We can trigger
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: nuclear reactions right We map out invisible electromagnetic fields.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: We calculate the precise orbital mechanics to land a heavy
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: rover onto a moving crater on Mars.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Exactly. Look at the device you're listening to us on
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: right now. You are holding humanity's greatest intellectual flex right
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: in the p of your hands.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: But here is the massive counterintuitive truth that is keeping
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: physicists awake at night. Despite all of that, the smartphones,
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: the space stations, the particle accelerators, the people at the
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: very bleeding edge of science are realizing something terrifying.
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: That the universe is just fundamentally weirder and vastly more
• 2:20
  Speaker 3: alien than our current theories can even begin to explain.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: So our mission today is to explore the architecture of
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: this cosmic uncertainty. We are going to look at the
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: irreconcilable clash between our two most proven scientific frameworks.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: We'll also examine the invisible ninety five percent of the
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: cosmos that is just well completely missing.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, missing, And eventually we have to ask a deeply
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: uncomfortable biological question, is the human brain even capable of
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: understanding the true nature of reality?
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: Let's start by unpacking that class you mentioned, because to
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: understand why physics is in a crisis, we really have
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: to look at the two absolute titans of modern science.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Right, the two pillars holding up everything we know.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: The problem is they absolutely hate each other.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: They cannot stand in the same room. I'm talking, of course,
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: about general relativity and quantum mechanics, two.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Incredibly successful theories that refuse to get along.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: So let's start with the big stuff. Can you walk
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: us through general relativity and how it actually works mechanically?
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Because I know we always hear that tired cliche about
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: a bowling ball and a trampoline.
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's just throw the trampoline out please. The problem
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: with the trampoline metaphor is that it uses gravity, you know,
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: the bowling ball being pulled downward to explain gravity, it's
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: entirely circular and honestly just confusing.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Right, It doesn't actually explain what's happening exactly.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: Instead, let's look at what Albert Einstein actually did in
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: nineteen fifteen. Before Einstein, Isaac Newton told us gravity was
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: a force.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Like an invisible tether, pulling objects together across an empty void.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: Right. But Einstein looked at the math and said, no,
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: space isn't just an empty stage where things happen. Space
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: and time are woven together into a dynamic, four dimensional fabric.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Space time, space time. Yeah, so it's an actual physical thing.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: It behaves like one. Yes, think of space time more
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: like a flowing invisible river. Massive objects like stars and planets,
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: they don't just sit in the river.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: They see change how it moves exactly.
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: They bend the flow of the water around them. So,
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: if you are a calmet flying through the Solar System,
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: you think you were moving in a straight line because
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: you're just coasting, right, But the river of space time
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: around the Sun is curved, so your path bends. You
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: aren't being pulled by some mysterious force. You are just
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: following the natural, warped geometry of the space you are
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: traveling through.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Wow. So Einstein figured out that gravity is just the
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: curvature of space time itself.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: That's exactly it.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: And we know this isn't just you know, math on
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: a chalkboard.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: We proved it, right, Oh, we proved it in spectacular fashion.
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: In nineteen nineteen, an astronomer named Arthur Eddington traveled to
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: an island off the coast of Africa.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: For a total solar eclipse.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: Right, yes, because he wanted to see if the Sun's
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: massive gravity would actually bend the light of the stars
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: sitting behind it.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: But he needed the eclipse so the Sun wouldn't blind the.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: Telescopes exactly, and it worked. The light curved exactly as
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: Einstein's equations predicted. And today we test it constantly.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Every single day. I mean, the GPS system on your
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: phone only works because of this.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: Because the satellites in orbit are experiencing slightly less gravity
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: than your phone down on the ground.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Right, they're further away from the Earth's mass.
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: And because gravity warps time as well as space, the
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: clocks on those satellites physically tick slightly faster than the
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: clock inside your phone.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: Wait, really, the clocks actually tick faster.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, if we didn't mathematically correct for general relativity, your
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: GPS would drift by miles every single day. You'd end
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: up in a lake instead of the grocery store.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: That is wild. The relativity is this smooth, continuous, predictable masterpiece.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: It handles big stuff perfectly, it really does. But then
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: we take an elevator all the way down to the
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: microscopic scale. We look at molecules, atoms, electrons, and suddenly
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: that flowing river of space time just vanishes.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: We are violently thrown into quantum mechanics.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: What exactly is happening down there? Because it sounds completely chaotic.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: The rules completely flip In the quantum realm. The universe
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: is no longer smooth and continuous. It is jittery, it's violent,
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: and it is highly pixelated.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: Pixelated Yeah, like a bad video.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: Game kind of Yeah. Energy and matter are broken up
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: into discrete, indivisible chunks called quanta. Think of a ramp
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: versus a staircase.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm visualizing it.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: Relativity is the smooth ramp. You can stand at literally
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: any possible millimeter of elevation on that ramp. But quantum
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: mechanics is the staircase.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: You can stand on step one or step two.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: Exactly, but you cannot physically exist in the empty space
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: between the steps.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: That feels incredibly unintuitive. I mean, if I am holding
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: a cup of coffee, I can move it across my
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: desk in a totally smooth motion. I am not teleporting
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: it from pixel to pixel.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: Well, that is because your coffee cup is made of
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: trillions of atoms. The sheer scale of it averages out
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: all that quantum jitteriness.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: So it just looks smooth to me.
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: Right, But if we look at a single electron, it
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: doesn't behave like a tiny billiard ball. It behaves according
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: to probabilities.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Okay, so it's not a solid thing.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: Not in the way we think of solid things. In
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: the quantum world, things do not have a definite state
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: or a definite location until they interact with something else.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: Okay. Individually, both of these theories are phenomenally successful. Relativity
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: runs the cosmos and our GPS quantum mechanics runs the
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: microchips inside the phone doing those GPS calculations.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: They both work perfectly in their own domains.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: Right, So why is physics in a crisis If they
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: both work what's the problem.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: The problem is when you try to put them together.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: When you try to use the mathematical equations of general
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: relativity to describe a quantum particle, the math literally explode,
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: explodes how the equations spit out infinities. They give you
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: totally impossible answers. It's much like when you try to
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: divide a number by zero on a calculator.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: And it just screams error at you.
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: Exactly it breaks.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: And I imagine the reverse is also true, like taking
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: quantum math to a planet.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: Yes, completely, If you try to apply the chunky probabilistic
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: rules of quantum mechanics to the smooth gravitational pull of
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: a galaxy, the math collapses into utter nonsense.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: So they just fundamentally disagree on reality they do.
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: Relativity demands that reality is strictly deterministic cause perfectly leads
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: to effect, but quantum mechanics demands that reality is inherently
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: uncertain and probabilistic.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: I like to picture it as trying to play chess
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: and poker on the exact same board at the exact
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: same time.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: That's a great way to look at it.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: You move your night and the person sitting across from
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: you just looked at you and says, I fold the
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: rules of one completely invalidate the rules of the other.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, the continuous geometry completely invalidates the discrete mathematics.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: But here's the thing that really bothers me about this.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: The universe itself isn't crashing.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: No, it'sugging along just fine.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: Right. The universe doesn't spit out divide by zero errors.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: A burning star is somehow obeying the massive laws of
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: gravity and the microscopic quantum mechanics of nuclear fusion at
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: the exact same time, which.
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: Leads us to a deeply unsettling implication. Reality operates with perfect,
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: unbroken consistency.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: Meaning the math is fine out there.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: Yes, therefore, the flaw isn't in the cosmos. The flaw
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: is in us. Out Our grandest, most heavily awarded conceptual
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: frameworks are profoundly flawed. They are likely just partial.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: Approximation, like distorted shadows on the cave wall.
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: Exactly, there are shadows of a much deeper, hidden structure
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: of reality that we haven't even begun to formulate yet.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, if that isn't humbly enough, let's pivot to
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: something even more frustrating. It gets worse because if our
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: mathematical models are breaking down, it begs the question are
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: we even looking at the whole board, And the answer
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: is no, we are missing almost all of it.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: We are indeed missing most of it. When you look
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: at at the night sky, you see stars, galaxies, glowing
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: clouds of nebula gas.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: It looks so full.
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: It does. But if you combine all of that visible
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: light with every planet, every asteroid, and you know your
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: own physical.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Body, everything made of atoms.
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: Everything we have ever categorized as ordinary matter, all of
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: that accounts for less than five percent of the cosmos.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Less than five percent. I mean, imagine taking apart your
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: car to understand how the engine works, but you are
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: only allowed to look at the windshield wipers and the.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: Rearview mirror, and the other ninety five percent of the
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: vehicle is totally invisible to you.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: This is exactly where humanity currently sits. What exactly makes
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: up the rest of this missing universe.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: It is divided into two phenomenal mysteries, dark matter and
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: dark energy. And we really need to be incredibly precise.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Here because dark sounds very sci fi right.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: The word dark in physics is really just a polite
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: placeholder for we have absolutely no idea what this is.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: Let's look at dark matter first, which makes up about
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: twenty seven percent the.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: Universe, right, yes, roughly twenty seven percent.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: If it is totally invisible, how do we even know
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: it is there? Are we just guessing to fix our
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: broken math?
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: No, we aren't guessing at all. We can measure its
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: gravitational footprint. In the nineteen seventies, an astronomer named Vera.
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: Rubin was studying the rotational speed of galaxies.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: Okay, so how fast they spin exactly?
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: Based on the laws of physics, the stars at the
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: very outer edges of a spinning galaxy should be moving
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: much slower than the stars near the dense center.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Because the center has all the mass right right.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: Think of a playground Merry go round. If you spin
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: it too fast, the kids on the very edge are
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: going to just fly off into.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: The dirt unless they're glued to the floor.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: Precisely. Ruben calculated the mass of all the visible light
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: in these galaxies and realized there wasn't nearly enough mass
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: to generate the gravity required to hold them together.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: So they were spinning too fast.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Insanely fast. By all known laws of physics, these galaxies
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: should have violently ripped themselves apart and slung their stars
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: out into the empty void.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: But they remained perfectly intact.
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: Yes, so there has to be some kind of invisible glue.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: Something with immense mass is generating a massive gravitational pull
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: holding these cosmic structures together.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: When that's dark matter.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Without dark matter, life as we know it couldn't exist
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: because galaxies could never form in the first place.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Well, we still haven't seen it. I mean, we've built
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: incredibly sensitive, super cool detectors deep down in underground minds
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: to try and catch a single particle of this stuff.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: And we have found absolutely nothing. It doesn't interact with light,
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: it ignores electromagnetism, and it doesn't bump into ordinary matter.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: So a chunk of dark matter could be passing completely
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: through your body right now as you listen to this,
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: and you wouldn't feel a thing, You wouldn't even notice. Okay,
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: so that is twenty seven percent, But that still leaves
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: the biggest piece of the pie dark energy.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: The real mystery.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: If dark matter is the invisible glue holding the galaxy together,
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: what is dark energy doing?
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: Energy is the mysterious force trying to blow everything apart,
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: and the way we discovered it was an absolute shock
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: to the scientific community. Also, for decades, astronomers assumed that
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: the gravitational pull of all the mass in the universe
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: would act like breaks.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Right, because of the Big Bang, the universe expanded, but
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: gravity is pulling everything back together, so it should be
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: slowing down.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: Exactly like throwing a baseball straight up into the air.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: It goes up, but gravity eventually slows it down and
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: pulls it back to your hand.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Makes toll sense.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: So in the late nineteen nineties, teams of astronomers started
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: measuring the light from a very specific, very distant exploding.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Star super novae.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: Yes Typeia supernovae. They were trying to measure exactly how
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: much the universe was slowing down, But the data came
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: back completely wrong.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: Wrong in what way.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: The universe wasn't slowing down at all. The expansion was
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: actually accelerating.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: So instead of the baseball slowing down in the air,
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: it just hit the gas pedal and rocketed out of
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: the atmosphere at a million miles an hour.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: That is exactly what is happening to the fabric of
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: the universe itself. Some unknown, deeply pervasive energy is actively
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: pushing galaxies apart faster and faster as time goes.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: On, and that makes up the bulk of everything.
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: Dark energy makes up roughly sixty eight percent of the cosmos,
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: and we are utterly clueless about its mechanism.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: I have to push back on the scientific establishment here
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: for a second, before it we write these thick textbooks,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: we give out Nobel prizes, We claim to be masters
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: of the cosmos. But we are a species that literally
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: lives in a universe where ninety five percent of existence
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: is completely missing from our understanding.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: It's absurd, isn't it.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: How do we even call that science?
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: It forces a severe reckoning with our own limitations. All
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: of our biology, our evolutionary history, our greatest technological instruments,
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: they are all exclusively tuned to that five percent.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: So we're just completely blind.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: We are a species of deep sea fish swimming around
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: in pitch blackness, claiming we completely understand the entire Earth,
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: while knowing absolutely nothing about the continents, the mountains, or
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: the sky.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Wow. Our entire intuition is built on just a tiny sliver.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Of reality, a very fragile sliver.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's focus on that sliver. Then let's look at
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: the five percent we actually can interact with. Let's zoom
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: all the way back down into the microscopic quantum realm.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Let's do it. Because earlier we talked about quantum mechanics
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: being pixelated and probabilistic. Let's get into the actual mechanics
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: of why quantum physics destroys our everyday logic so thoroughly.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: The best way to dismantle our everyday logic is to
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: look at a concept called superposition.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for me.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: Let's use an everyday object. If you have a physical
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: coin and you place it on a table, it is
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: either showing heads or it is showing tails.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Right, it is a definite state.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: But in the quantum world, particles do not possess definite
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: states until they are forced to. If an electron were
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: a coin, while it is flying through the air, it
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: isn't heads or tails, and what is it? It is is
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: mathematically smeared out into a wave of probabilities existing in
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: a superposition of both states simultaneously.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Wait, wait, I need clarity on this. When you say
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: it's mathematically smeared out, do you just mean, we don't
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: know which state it's in because our instruments are bad.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: No.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: No, like it is definitely heads or tails. We just
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: haven't looked closely enough yet.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: No.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: And that is the crucial distinction that drives people crazy.
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: It is not a lack of knowledge on our part.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: The electron physically exists as a wave of potential outcomes.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: How can we possibly know that?
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: We know this because of the famous double slit experiment.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: If you fire physical pellets like tiny marbles at a
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: wall with two vertical slits in it, you get two
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: distinct bands of pellets hitting the screen behind the wall right.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: They either go through the left slit or the right
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: slit two stripes.
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: But if you fire a single electron at those two slits,
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: it doesn't just go through one slit or the other.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: It goes through both slits simultaneously, as a wave of
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: probability to.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Go through both slits at the exact same time, single particle.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Yes, it interferes with itself on the other side and
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: creates a highly complex wave pattern on the screen.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: That is, I mean, that's impossible.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: But here is where it becomes deeply unsettling. If you
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: place a detector at the slips to measure exactly which
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: one the electron goes through. The electron instantly stops acting
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: like a wave.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Wait, what does it do?
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: It seemingly chooses a single path, goes through one slit,
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: and acts like a normal solid pellet. Again, you get
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: two stripes on the wall.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: Hold on, you are telling me the universe actually cares
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: if I am looking at it.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: That is what the math implies.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: If I watch the electron, it behaves normally. If I
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: look away, it turns into a magical wave of probability.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: That sounds like mysticism, not science.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: I completely understand the frustration.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, if a tree falls in the woods and
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: no one observes it, quantum mechanics implies the tree is
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: in a superposition of falling and not falling.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: Well, we have to define what observation means here, because
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: it's a loaded word in quantum mechanics. An observer does
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: not require a conscious human mind or an eyeball.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: Okay, so what is it?
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: An observation is simply a physical interaction. When you shine
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: light on an electron to measure it, those photons of
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: light physically hit the electron.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, so you're bouncing things off.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: It exactly that physical transfer of information forces the electrons
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: wave of probabilities to collapse into a single, definite reality.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: But even still, why should a transfer of information dictate reality?
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: It just gets weirder the deeper we go, especially when
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: we talk about quantum entanglement.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: Entanglement is where our fundamental concepts of space and distance
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: completely fall apart.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: I've heard of this. This is the spooky stuff, very spooky.
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: In a laboratory, you can take two subatomic particles, let's say,
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: two photons of light, and interact them in a way
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: that their quantum states become permanently linked.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: They become entangled.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: Right, they share a single mathematical description. If you measure one,
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: you instantly know the state of the other.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Which makes sense to me if they are sitting right
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: next to each other on a lab bench.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: Sure, but the math says the physical distance between them
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: doesn't matter, not at all, not at all. You could
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: take one of those entangled photons, put it in a
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: highly secure box and keep it here on Earth.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: You could take the other photon, put it in a
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: rocket and shoot it a million light years away to
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: the Andromeda galaxy.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, So we have one photon here in the room,
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: one photon way out Andromeda.
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: Right, and they are both in a superposition, spinning in
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: all possible directions at once. But the exact moment you
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: open the box here on Earth and measure your photon,
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: forcing it to pick a definite state, say it decides
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: to spin up, the entangled photon in the Andromeda galaxy
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: will instantaneously snap into the opposite state, spinning.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Down instantaneously, like faster than the speed of light.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, zero time delay. Albert Einstein absolutely loathed this concept.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: I can see why it breaks his speed limit.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: He called it spooky action at a distance. It violated
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: his theory of relativity, which clearly states that nothing, no
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: physical object, no information, nothing can travel faster than the
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: speed of light.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: So how did he explain it?
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: Einstein argued that quantum mechanics just had to be incomplete.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: He believed there must be hidden variables. What does that mean,
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: like secret internal programming inside the particles telling them what
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: to do in advance.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: So Einstein thought they were kind of like a pair
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: of gloves, Like if I put the left glove in
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: a box on Earth and send the right glove to Andromeda.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: The moment I opened my box and see a left glove,
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: I instantly know the one in Andromeda is.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: A right glove exactly. His argument was that no information
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: actually traveled faster than light. They were always left and
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: right gloves from the start.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, that sounds much more logical. Did we figure out
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: who was right?
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: We did. In the nineteen sixties, a physicist named John
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: Bell came up with a brilliant mathematical theorem to test
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: this exact thing, and subsequent experiments absolutely proved that Einstein
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: was wrong.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: Wait, Einstein was wrong.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: He was.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: There are no hit in variables. The particles literally do
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: not decide their state until the exact moment.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Of measurement, so the spooky action is real.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: The universe is fundamentally non local, meaning things can be
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: deeply connected in ways that entirely ignore the physical distance
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: between them, which brings us.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: To a massive philosophical nightmare. If particles communicate instantaneously across
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: whole galaxies and interacting with them forces reality to snap
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: into existence, what does that mean for us?
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: You mentioned earlier that human concepts might just be failing
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: us here, and that is absolutely.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: The case, because it just feels like magic.
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: It feels like magic because we are trying to describe
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: a profoundly interconnected, deeply mathematical universe using a vocabulary that
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: was designed for hunting prey and picking berries on a savannah.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: Right, Our language relies on concepts like here, there, before,
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: and after.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: But quantum entanglement suggests that space and distance might just
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: be illusions entirely, the universe doesn't see a million light
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: years of empty space. At a deeper informational level, those
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: two particles are still right next to each other.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: Okay, so our vocabulary is broken. General relativity says reality
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: is a smooth river. Quantum mechanics says reality is a pixelated,
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: spooky casino. We know they both work in their own domains.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: What happens if we force them together?
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: That is the ultimate test.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Is there anywhere in the universe where we actually have
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: to use both sets of rules at the exact same time.
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: There is the ultimate cosmic crucible, a black hole. Of course,
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: when you try to describe what happens inside a black hole,
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: you are forced to smash relativity and quantum mechanics together.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: And this is where physics doesn't just get weird, it
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: completely catastrophically breaks.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's set the physical stage for this. According to
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: the smooth mathematics of general relativity, a black hole is
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: created when a massive star collapses under its own gravity.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: A supernova collapse, and.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: The gravity becomes so intensely powerful that space time itself
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: curves completely the inward on itself. It creates an event.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: Horizon right the point of new return.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: A boundary where the gravitational pull is so strong that
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: not even light can escape.
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: Correct, And according to relativity, whatever crosses that event horizon,
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: whether it's a stray asteroid, a cloud of gas, or
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: let's say an entire encyclopedia, it gets dragged relentlessly down
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: into the very.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Center, into a point of infinite density a singularity.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: Yes, it is a one way trip. The encyclopedia goes
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: in and it is permanently locked away from the rest
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: of the universe forever.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: But wait, if nothing can ever escape a black hole,
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: how does that break physics? It just sounds like a
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: cosmic trash. Can things go in they don't come out?
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: Simple it breaks physics. Because of a discovery made by
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: Stephen Hawking in the nineteen seventies, Hawking realized you cannot
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: ignore quantum mechanics near a black hole. Let's look at
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: the vacuum of empty space for a second. Quantum mechanics
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: tells us that empty space isn't actually empty.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Wait, space isn't empty, not at all.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: It is constantly boiling with pairs of virtual partsarticles that
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: pop into existence out of nowhere, annihilate each other, and disappear.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: So space is just constantly fizzing with tiny.
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: Particles, exactly like carbonation and a soda. Now imagine this
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: fizzing happening right perfectly on the edge of the black
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: holes event.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: Horizon rund the boundary.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: Yes, one particle of the pair pops into existence just
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: barely inside the event horizon and gets sucked into the
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: black hole. But the other particle pops into existence just
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: outside the event horizon, and it manages to escape out
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: into space.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: And because it escaped, the black hole just emitted something.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: It emitted radiation.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: Yes, this is called Hawking radiation. And here is the
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: mechanical trick to conserve the energy of the universe. The
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: particle that falls in must have negative.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Energy, which does what to the black hole.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: It physically subtracts mass from it. So over unimaginable trillions
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: of years. As this radiation leaks out, particle by particle,
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: the black hole slowly shrinks. Eventually, eventually it completely evaporates
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: into appears gone.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, so the black hole evaporates, I follow that. But
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: why does this create a paradox?
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: Because of the encyclopedia we threw in earlier. Oh right,
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: the book Quantum Mechanics has one strict, unbreakable law. Information
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: cannot truly be destroyed.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: We probably needed define information here because obviously the paper
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: and ink of the encyclopedia get crushed to pieces.
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: We mean quantum information. The fundamental properties, the spin, the charge,
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: the exact microscopic arrangement of particles that makes the encyclopedia
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: different from say, a toaster.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: Got it.
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: Quantum Mechanics dictates that even if you burn a book
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: in a fire, the information isn't actually lost. It is
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: just scrambled into smoke, ash and thermal radiation.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: So it's still there, just messy.
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: Exactly. If you had a godlike supercomputer, you could measure
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: every single particle of smoke, reverse the physics, and perfectly
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: rebuild the book. The universe demands that you can always
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: rewind the tape. Information is perfectly conserved.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: I see exactly where this is going. Yeah, the encyclopedia
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: goes into the black hole. The black hole eventually evaporates
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: into this Hawking radiation.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: Can we use the supercomputer to look at the Hawking
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: radiation and rebuild the encyclopedia.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: No, we can't because Hawking radiation is entirely random. It
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: is just generic thermal.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: Noise, so it doesn't carry the data.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: It contains zero quantum information about what originally fell into
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: the black hole. So the black hole vanishes, the encyclopedia
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: is gone, and the radiation left behind has no memory.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: Of it, meaning the information has been permanently, irrevocably deleted
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: from the universe.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: And this is the black hole information paradox. Relativity says
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: the information is destroyed. Quantum mechanics says that it's physically impossible.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: It's just a total contradiction. But let me ask you this,
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Why does it matter so much if the universe deletes
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: a few files, like who cares if a book is gone?
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: It matters because if information can be permanently destroyed the
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: fundamental cause and effect chain of reality, it completely unravels.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: Really, yes, all of science lies on determinism. The past
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: determines the present, and the present determines the future. If
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: information vanishes, you can no longer rewind the universe to
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: see what happened in the.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Past, and you can no longer predict what will happen
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: in the future.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: Exactly, The entire foundation of science crumbles.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: So we either have to throw out quantum mechanics or
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: we have to completely rethink what a black hole is.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: We have to rethink everything, and trying to solve this
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: paradox has pushed theoretical physicists into some deeply uncomfortable territory.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: To save the universe's information. They're starting to look at
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: the very fabric of space and time and asking if
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: it even exists at all.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: Right This is perhaps the most profound paradigm shift happening
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: in physics right now. Because of the sheer mathematical weight
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: of the black hole paradox, physicists are starting to suspect
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: that space and time are not fundamental ingredients of reality.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: I really need you to explain that carefully. Because space
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: is the room I am sitting in, time is the
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: thing and keeping everything from happening all at once, How
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: can they not be fundamental.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: We have to understand the concept of an emergent property.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: Okay, emergent property, what does that mean?
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: Think about the temperature of a hot cup of tea.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: If you put your hands around the mug, you feel heat.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: You can measure the temperature with a thermometer. Temperature feels
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: incredibly real and fundamental.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: Sure burns your tongue, right.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: But if you zoom in with a microscopic lens, there
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: is no physical temperature particle floating in the tea. There
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: are only water molecules moving around kinetically.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: So the speed of the molecules creates the illusion of
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: temperature exactly.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: Temperature is an emergent property. It only exists as a
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: collective behavior of millions of deeper fundamental moving parts.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, I follow that physicists.
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: Are now applying this exact logic to space and time.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Wait really, yes, the.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: Three dimensional space you move through and the ticking of
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: the clock might just be emergent properties. They are illusions
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: generated by deeper underlying quantum informational processes.
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the holographic principle. And I have
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: to admit, when I first read about this, it genuinely
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: broke my brain. It breaks everyone's brain, because if space
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: is just an emergent illusion, how is it generated. The
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: theory is that the three D reality we experience is
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: actually just encoded information projected from a flat two D boundary.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: Can you visualize that for us?
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: Let's go back to the black hole to make sense
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: of it. In the nineteen seventies, a physicist named Jacob
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: Beekenstein realized something astonishing. What did you find if you
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: throw an object into a black hole? You are adding
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: information to it? Right? You would think the three D
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: volume of the black hole would have to increase to
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: store that extra information.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: Like blowing air into a balloon.
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: Right, But Beekenstein proved that the information is actually stored
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: on the two D surface area of the event.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: Horizon, the boundary itself.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: Yes, the entire three dimensional contents of the black hole
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: are mathematically encoded on its two dimensional surface.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: That is just like a physical hologram, like that shiny
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: flat sticker on a credit card.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: That is the perfect analogy.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: It is physically a two D surface, but the way
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: the microscopic grooves are etched into it scatters light to
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: project a fully three D image that looks like it has.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: Depth exactly now. Theoretical physicists like Juan Maldasana took that
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: math and asked a terrifying question. What if that applies
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: to the entire universe, the whole thing. What if everything
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: around us, the distance between you and the wall, the
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: distance between Earth and the sun, is not real. What
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: if all the quantum information that describes our three D
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: reality is actually smeared across a two dimensional mathematical boundary
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: infinitely far away.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: So essentially, like we are wandering around inside a massively complex,
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: fully three D video game, we are running around experiencing physics,
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: dropping items, looking up at a sky that feels infinitely deep.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: But in ultimate reality, everything.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: We're experiencing is just flat two D code being processed
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: on a server screen somewhere.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: That is a remarkably accurate way to think about it.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: If the holographic principle is true, your ordinary perception completely
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: and utterly misrepresents the true architecture of existence.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: So as moving my hand feels real, but.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: It's not, the feeling of moving your hand from left
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: to right is just a shifting pattern of quantum entanglement
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: happening on a lower dimensional surface.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: If that is true. If our universe is a holographic
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: projection or an emergent property of deeper quantum code, we
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: really have to look backward to the beginning. Yeah, where
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: did the code come from? I mean, every physics class
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: teaches that everything started with the Big Bang. But the
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: deeper we go into this, the more the Big Bang
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: starts to feel like a really incomplete story.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Well, we have to give credit where it's due. The
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: Big Bang model is incredibly successful at explaining the aftermath.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: The aftermath.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: Sure, it explains why galaxies are currently moving apart, It
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: perfectly predicts the exact ratio of hydrogen and helium in
• 31:51
  Speaker 3: the cosmos, and most importantly, we can actually see the
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: leftover heat from the explosion.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: The cosmic microwave background.
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: Right. Yes, the cosmic microwave background radiation is literally an
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: echo of the early universe that we can pick up
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: with radio telescopes today.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: Right, But it has massive glaring flaws. The standard Big
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: Bang model explains what happened nanoseconds after the universe started expanding,
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: but it utterly fails to explain what actually caused the
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: expansion or what existed before it exactly. It's like arriving
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: at the scene of a car crash and perfectly measuring
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: the skid marks on the pavement, but having absolutely no
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: idea who was driving or why the car exploded in
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: the first place.
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: That's spot on. And worse, there are physical problems with
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: the universe we see today that a simple Big Bang
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: cannot solve.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: Right, like the horizon problem.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Yes, the horizon problem is a massive one. When we
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: measure that leftover heat in the cosmos the background radiation,
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: we find that the universe is the exact same temperature
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: everywhere we look down to a tiny, tiny fraction of
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: a degree.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: Which sounds fine until you think about it.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: Right, because if the universe simply exploded outward in the
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: standard big Bang, there hasn't been enough time for the
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: far left side of the universe to exchange heat with
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: the far right side of the universe.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: They are just too far apart. Light hasn't had time
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: to cross that gap.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: It's like walking into a massive, sprawling mansion and finding
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: out every single room is precisely seventy two point zero
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: zero one degrees even though the air conditioning just turned
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: on a second ago. It simply shouldn't be possible.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: So how did physicists solve that, because obviously the temperature
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: is even.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: In the nineteen eighties, an astrophysicist named Alan Guth proposed
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: a mathematical fix called cosmic inflation inflation okay. He theorized
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: that in the very first fraction of a second of existence,
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: the universe didn't just expand normally, it underwent an unimaginably
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: violent exponential hyper expansion. Space itself stretched vastly faster than
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: the speed of light.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Wow. And that solves the temperature issue.
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: It perfectly explains why the temperature is so even. The
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: universe equalized its temperature when it was a microscopic and
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: then it was instantly inflated to cosmic proportions.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: So it solves the math problem. But inflation theory inadvertently
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: opened to terrifying door.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: It absolutely did.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Because once you establish the mathematics of inflation olies something
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: about quantum fields, it is very hard to make inflation
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: stop everywhere, all at once, which brings us to the multiverse.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: This is where we transition from a single universe to
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: an infinite fractal The theory is called eternal cosmic.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Inflation internal inflation. That sounds heavy.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: It suggests that the fundamental baseline of reality is not
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: empty space. The baseline is a continuously inflating quantum field. Okay,
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: every so often quantum fluctuations cause a tiny localized pocket
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: of this field to just stop expanding so violently. The
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: energy in that specific pocket converts into matter and radiation,
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: creating a localized Big Bang exactly. That pocket becomes a
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: bubble universe. And because the background field is inflating eternally,
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: it is constantly spawning new bubble universe forever, wait, forever, forever.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: Our entire observable cosmos. Everything we have ever seen with
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: the Hubble or the James Web Space telescope is just
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: one microscopic bubble sitting in a vast, infinitely boiling ocean
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: of other universes.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: And what blows my mind is that these other bubbles
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: wouldn't necessarily look like ours, not at all. If the
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: underlying math of the quantum field can settle into different configurations,
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: these parallel universes could have entirely different laws of physics.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: That's the logical conclusion of the math.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: You could have a universe where the strong nuclear force
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: is slightly weaker, meaning carbon can never form, meaning life
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: is completely impossible. You could have a universe with eleven
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: dimensions or a universe with two dimensions of time.
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: Which brings us to a crucial philosophical crossroad because the
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: only tool we have to describe eleven dimensions, or a
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: holographic boundary or eternal cosmic inflation is mathematics.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: Right, we can't actually see any of this.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: No, we have completely left the realm of physical experimentation
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: and entered the realm of pure math.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about the role of math then, because I
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: think the average person myself included, views math simply as
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: a tool, like a language. We invented a lot of
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: people view it that way. Early humans had ten fingers,
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: we needed to trade sheep, We needed to measure the
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: perimeter of a farm, so we invented counting in geometry.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: It feels like an artificial construct.
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: But in the nineteen sixties a physicist named Eugene Wigner
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: wrote a famous paper called the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: in the Natural Sciences. Unreasonable Effectiveness, Wigner pointed out something
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: deeply eerie. If math is just a human invention for
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: counting sheep, why does it have such terrifying predictive power
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: over the universe.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: What do you mean by predictive power? Like predicting an eclipse.
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: Much deeper than that time and time again in history,
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: a pure mathematician will dream up an incredibly abstract, bizarre
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: set of equations simply for the intellectual joy of exploring
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: a pattern.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: Just having fun with number.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: Right, the math sits in a textbook, completely useless for reality.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: But then fifty years later a physicist studying something completely unknown,
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: like the curved geometry of space time or the spin
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: of a subatomic particle, will suddenly realize that the physical
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: universe is perfectly baying the exact mathematical rules that were
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: dreamed up decades ago.
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: Wait, really, so Einstein didn't invent the math for curved
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: space time.
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: No, he didn't. He used non Euclidean geometry, which mathematicians
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: had played around with in the eighteen hundreds, just as
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: a theoretical exercise. The universe perfectly maps onto the math.
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: That is deeply weird.
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: It forces us to ask, is mathematics just a language
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: we invented to describe reality, or is reality fundamentally made
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: of mathematics?
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: If the universe is literally a physical manifestation of mathematical structures.
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: Then the implications are.
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: Staggering because the math is infinite.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: Exactly, if mathematical structures are infinite and the multiverse is
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: generating every possible mathematical variation, then reality is vastly, unfathomably
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: larger and more complex than anything our biology was prepared for.
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: Which brings us to perhaps the most sobering question of
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: this entire conversation.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: The biological question.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: We have to look objectively at our own biology. Can
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: the human brain even comprehend the ultimate truth of reality?
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: Right? We have to talk about the savannah brain. Human
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: cognition has inherent biological limitations.
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: We are animals at the end of the day.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the human brain did not evolve to solve the
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: mathematical architecture of the cosmos. Our brains evolved over millions
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: of years on the African savannah. We evolved to hunt,
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: to gather, to spot the pattern of a tiger moving
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: in the tall grass. Yes, we evolved an intuition for
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: three dimensions of space because that is what was required
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: to throw a spear in a parabolic arc. We evolved
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: an intuition for linear time because that helped us track
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: the changing of the seasons.
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: Obsisely, we evolved an intuitive understanding of medium sized objects
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: moving at medium speeds. We fundamentally did not to intuitively
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: grasp quantum superpositions or relativistic time dilation or eleven dimensional
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: scring theory.
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: So we are essentially trying to run a next generation
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: universe simulation on a biological hard drive that was built
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: to process rocks, fire, and running.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: That is exactly what we're doing. It is a severe
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: cognitive bottleneck. Think about a highly intelligent dog. Okay, a
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: dog can understand complex social dynamics, It can learn vocabulary,
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: It can catch a frisbee by intuitively calculating a trajectory
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: in mid air.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: Right. Dogs are smart.
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: But no matter how many years you spend trying to
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: teach that dog calculus, it will never understand it. It
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: lacks the cognitive hardware.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: It literally doesn't have the brain for it.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: Humanity may face a similar hard biological boundary. There may
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: be a foundational level of reality that is simply inaccessible
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: to our minds. We might eventually formulate the math, but
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: we will never be able to truly visualize or intuitively
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: grasp it.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: I feel like we were already hitting that brick wall.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, when physicists talk about the holographic principle or
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: particles being fundamentally non local, they openly admit they cannot
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: picture it in their heads.
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: No one can. We just trust the equations.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: So what is the next step? Because humans are incredibly clever,
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: when we hit a biological limit, we build a tool
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: to bypass it.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: We always have.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: We couldn't outrun a cheetah, so we built cars. We
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: couldn't fly, so we built airplanes. What happens when we
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: reach the limit of our cognitive processing?
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: We build a better brain. We turn to artificial intelligence.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: Of course, AI.
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: AI does not have the evolutionary baggage of the African savannah.
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: It does not possess a rigid intuition based bias towards
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: three D space and linear.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Time because it didn't evolve to throw spears exactly.
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: An advanced AI system simply processes raw data and multidimensional
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: mathematics without needing to visualize it at all.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: So what happens when we feed all of our broken
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: physics into it? The clash between relativity and quantum mechanics,
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: the black hole information paradise, the dark matter data. What
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: happens when we feed all of that into a hyper
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: advanced AI.
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: We arrive at a strange, imminent paradox. In the very
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: near future, an AI might look at the data and
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: spit out a unified mathematical framework.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: It might actually solve it.
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: It might solve quantum gravity. It might output an equation
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: that perfectly, elegantly explains the ninety five percent of the
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: universe we are currently missing.
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: And we will take that equation, run physical experiments and
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: confirm that it works perfectly.
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: Yes, the technology will work. But the paradox is this.
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: The AI's mathematical model of reality might involve twenty dimensions
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: of emergent space time that are so intensely complex no
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: biological human being alive can actually understand how or why
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: it works.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: So it's a black box.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: We will be handed the ultimate answers to the universe
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: by a machine acting as a black box oracle. We
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: will use the answers to build incredible technology, but the
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: intuitive conceptual understanding of reality will have officially slipped bie
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: on human grasp forever.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: We let the machines understand the universe and we just
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: live in it. Yeah, Oh okay, let's pull all this together.
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: If we take a step back and look at the
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: portrait we've painted today, the reality we actually inhabit is
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: completely unrecognizable from the reality we wake up to every morning.
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: It really is.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: The things we touch are mostly empty space, dictated by
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: jittery probabilities. Time as we experience it might not flow
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: at all. It might just be an emergent illusion created
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: by deeper quantum data. Matter is just temporary excitations in
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: invisible fields.
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: Empty space is boiling with phantom particles.
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: Causality can be broken. The entire three D world might
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: be a flat projection.
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: And we really have to accept that our most foundational concepts, particles, forces, dimensions,
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: even space time itself might eventually be discarded entirely.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: It's thrown out.
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: Think of the ancient astronomers who believe the Earth was
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: the center of the universe and that the planets were
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: attached to invisible crystal spheres.
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: Right the Ptolemaic model.
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: It was a mathematical model that worked for them. It
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: allowed them to predict eclipses and track the seasons perfectly,
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: but it was fundamentally beautifully wrong.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: And you think that's us right now, we are.
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: Likely going to look back on our current models of
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: relativity and quantum mechanics with that exact same mixture of
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: fondness and pity.
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: So if we take away one core lesson from all
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: this quantum chaos and cosmic uncertainty, what should it be?
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: The deepest lesson of modern physics is not a lesson
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: in certainty. It is a lesson in profound humility.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: Humility.
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: I like that every single time humanity has undergone a
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: scientific revolution, it has expanded reality into something stranger, vastly larger,
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: and deeply counterintuitive. Earth isn't the center, Space isn't empty,
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: Time isn't absolute.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: And there's no reason to assume we've hit the final truth.
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: There is absolutely no logical reason to assume this pattern
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: has magically stopped with us today. The universe is not
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: obligated to make sense to a primate brain. Science is
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: really just the relentless process of discovering just how profoundly
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: ignorant we truly are.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly humbling, but honestly it is also thrilling.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: It leaves you wondering where the next breakthrough is actually
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: going to come from, And I want to leave you
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: the listener with one final speculative thought to mull Over,
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: building entirely on what we just discussed about our biological limitations.
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: Oh, this is a good one.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: We talked about how our savannah brains trap us in
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: this rigid illusion of space and time, and earlier we
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: talked about the quantum observer effect, how the physical act
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: of an interaction forces the universe to collapse from a
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: wave of probabilities into a single definite.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: State, right the collapse of the wave function.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: If the fundamental structure of the cosmos is deeply interconnected,
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: and if our biological interaction with reality somehow dictates how
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: reality presents itself to us, perhaps the final frontier of
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: physics isn't out there in the void.
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: It might be much closer.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: Perhaps the ultimate breakthrough won't come from building a massive
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: new particles accelerator or launching a larger telescope into orbit.
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: Then where does it come from?
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: If the diagnostic tools of our current physics are broken
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: because we are looking at the universe through a biologically constrained,
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: flawed perspective, maybe unlocking the true higher dimensional nature of
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: reality will require an evolutionary leap in human consciousness itself.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: That is, a wild thought.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: A cognitive shift where we finally stop trying to mathematically
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: measure the cosmos using the blunt tools of our rigid
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: three D brains, and instead learn how to truly fundamentally
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: observe it. Maybe we don't need to fix the diagnostic machines.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: Maybe we just need to realize we were never looking
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: at a broken universe in the first place. We were
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: just blinded by the light